Rowan Mangan:
So Marty and I read a thing recently.

Martha Beck:
Yes, we did.

Rowan Mangan:
And this thing said that in dangerous or chaotic times, it’s super, super important to listen to your intuition, which struck us as interesting.

Martha Beck:
Interesting and frightening because this is a spicy time in history, and we have been succumbing to bouts of fear. And we got talking about what’s the strategy then? How do we steer our way through chaotic times? And this episode is our answer to that.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right. We hope you enjoy it, and we’ll see you on the other side.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I am Martha Beck.

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

Martha Beck:
Oh, trying so hard.

Rowan Mangan:
So hard.

Martha Beck:
What are you trying to figure out today?

Rowan Mangan:
Many things, harder by the day do I try to figure them out. But you know I always enjoy this part of the podcast more when I talk about us and our relationship.

Martha Beck:
Oh boy. Oh boy.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like the listeners get to enjoy a little glimpse behind the curtain. And uh—

Martha Beck:
Is that necessarily a good thing?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know, but it does make me feel better. I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
All right, I dunno what you’re about to say, but I’ve girded my loins for it.

Rowan Mangan:
So regular listeners will know that I have this side hustle obsession, not side hustle in the sense that it makes me money, but side hustle in the sense that I think about it a lot. And it’s like a parallel universe where I live #vanlife and I have a van and I travel around in it, sleep in it, drive it, all the things.

Martha Beck:
Is this different from all the other times you’ve talked about van life on this podcast, the other 400 times?

Rowan Mangan:
But the thing is that you flop around between trying to support me in clearly what is just a harmless hobby of thinking about vans. And then other times, you say like you just did, “Is this is any different from all the other times?” So you have different ways that you deal with it at different times. And I want to tell the listeners a story about not so long ago when you were trying to be supportive and as a result we kind of both ended up telling each other some home truths. And this is how it went. I wrote it down at the time, because I thought—

Martha Beck:
Oh my goodness.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m going to need this verbatim.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
So, there were whales on Instagram as they so often are in our algo, right?

Martha Beck:
In my algo.

Rowan Mangan:
In your algo, you’ve got the algo with all the animals. But it was my Instagram because you can’t be trusted with social media as we know.

Martha Beck:
No argument.

Rowan Mangan:
So you said to me very sweetly upon seeing the whales and where they were at some geographical place that I think must have been on this continent because what you said was, “We could go see the whales in the van.” We could van down there, you said, and I don’t know why, but it maybe it’s because it’s my thing or something, but I sort of said to you, “Marty, I love you so much, but I have to tell you in my full integrity, you are not always invited in the van.” And it was hard for me to say, but I also felt like if this relationship is going to stand the test of time, we have to be able to be honest with each other. And so in that spirit, in the spirit of honesty and the long-term survival of our relationship, you replied to my “you’re not always invited in the van” with, and I quote, “Good, I don’t want to go in your weird little trolley wagon anyway!” Weird little trolley wagon. And that’s how we both learned that Ro doesn’t want Marty in the van, and Marty doesn’t want Marty in the van.

Martha Beck:
I have only one counter to that argument.

Rowan Mangan:
Go ahead.

Martha Beck:
Those whales could not possibly have been on this continent because there are no whales on the continent. Now.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the best you can do?

Martha Beck:
Yes, because I’ve switched my allegiance from van to whale. Actually it was always there, but it’s now out in the open. And I guess we just try to go on from here.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll be driving my van, and you’ll be riding a whale like a cowboy with your cowboy hat. What do they do? They kind of just shake them above their head or something? Do they do something? I dunno.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, they do sometimes hold their hats, but I’ve never figured out why. And also they’re not on whales, but other than that, it’s perfect.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s a perfect analogy.

Martha Beck:
It would be really cool if they were. Anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
So what are you trying to figure out, Marty?

Martha Beck:
I am trying to figure out how to interface with the service providers of the world because I keep having these experiences that are just baffling to me and also to people who are in positions where they’re meant to make things happen, and clearly that is not their jam. So I’ve had this rash of things. I went to the eye doctor and I went out, I had my eye exam, I went out, I was supposed to come back, so I say to the receptionist, “I need to come back in two weeks, said the doctor.” And she stared at me. This woman looked up and her eyes opened so wide you could see the white all around the iris. And she just said, “What?” And I was like, “I’m supposed to come back in two weeks.” And she’s like, “Two weeks from now?” And then she started just pawing on her keyboard and staring at the computer in a state of great alarm. I don’t know what it was.

Rowan Mangan:
So it was like she had the attitude of “I’ve never been asked something like this before.”

Martha Beck:
Exactly. Like, “How could you?” It was as if I just told her that there was a whale giving birth in the yard and we needed gaffer tape. Yeah, there was a whale on a van. Oh, that brings a story to mind. No. Anyway, she looked—

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I know what you were thinking too.

Martha Beck:
Oh, nevermind. She looked completely flabbergasted. And then I said, “Well, could you just give me one of the appointment cards you have in your little case in front of you?” And she stared at them as if they had burst into flame. And then she just, with those wide eyes started pawing at them, but her fingers were all flimsy like Vienna sausages. And this went on for some minutes until I finally said, “Is there something wrong?” And she said, and I quote, “Some of them are upside down.” I’m like, why are you in this job? And then you and I went to an airport and we were supposed to—

Rowan Mangan:
This is years ago, and I want to say this is years ago because I feel like there’s a chance we’ve talked about it on here before. And so in the interests of transparency, this one was years ago.

Martha Beck:
So there was a driver at an airport and we were waiting in the limo pickup thing line at one in the morning. And we called her and she said, “I had to leave. The police were here.” I was like, why would you have to leave?

Rowan Mangan:
It wasn’t like a stretch limo, guys, folks, it was just a car to give us a ride.

Martha Beck:
It was a van, let’s be clear. It was a van. The woman had a van, a minivan, and she sounded high off her titties. And she was like, “I had to leave, man, because there were police. The fuzz were on me.” And she sounded like elderly. And we’re like, “Well, can you come pick us up at the limo thing?” She’s like, “No, you’re going to have to come to me.” And we’re like, “Where are you in this dark airport in the middle of the night?” And she said, “I’m right here!”

Rowan Mangan:
She was so frustrated. She was just exasperated beyond like, “How stupid are you people? I’m right here. Look, I can see me, clear as day.”

Martha Beck:
We never did, we never did find her. We had to call an Uber or something. And then finally, and this pertains to what we’re going to talk about in the episode, we recently contacted a real estate agent about a property we will never own.

Rowan Mangan:
Ever own.

Martha Beck:
Ever. Because it was just one of those things where you call a realtor and pretend you can afford something. This huge property with a private lake to go kayaking on and everything. And it has all these different structures. And we’re looking at it on Zillow and we call this woman and she’s like, “Oh, you’re interested in that? Why, I was just there. It has the following features…” And she starts reading off the same Zillow account that we have just read. So we’re watching her, this takes, I don’t know, half an hour. It seemed to go on forever. And then she talked about the private lake and the kayaking. And we said, “Well, here’s the thing. There is now an automatic climate warning thing. And it says that on this property, the threat of flooding is not only extreme, but virtually certain. This place will flood. What do you have to say about that?” And she said, “Oh, well there’s no water around.” And we said, “But the lake.” And she said, “Oh, oh, of course the lake, but it’s not that kind of lake.” She said, “I just saw it. You could tell it’s not that kind of lake.” Where in real estate school do they not teach people about that water and flooding go together and that lakes are generally water?

Rowan Mangan:
It was a weird moment. It was the first time she stopped talking for quite a long time, and we had nothing to say. “It’s not that kind of lake, it’s not that kind of lake. It would never.”

Martha Beck:
I’m just thinking we’re going into a chaotic moment, I fear, in history, world history, certainly USA history. And it seems to me that people who are in the wrong job should run away now because in chaos everything shifts. And if you can’t pick up an appointment card and you’re a receptionist with little Vienna sausage fingers who’s completely baffled by a card being upside down, run and run to a job, I don’t know, a muffin bakery or something where you’d be joyful.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve worked as both receptionist and bakery person. And I don’t think you can underestimate how stressful those jobs are. I just feel like I should say that.

Martha Beck:
And I totally agree with that. And the people who do those jobs are, they are so endlessly kind and patient and everything.

Rowan Mangan:
And also you are quite weird. You can be quite weird.

Martha Beck:
Not so weird that saying I need to come back in two weeks is totally, totally incomprehensible.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but we only have your word for it that that’s how it went down.

Martha Beck:
We were both on the phone when the woman said, “It’s not that kind of lake.” Was that my fault too?

Rowan Mangan:
No, a hundred percent not. A hundred percent.

Martha Beck:
I see the size of it. Not invited to the van. And now, Vienna sausage finger lady was probably just responding to my weird pheromones or something.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. So I’ll tell you why I felt the need to say this.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, okay.

Rowan Mangan:
I felt the need to say this because here’s, here’s what my working class, old used-to-be-working-class brain heard you say, “Can’t get good help these days! I was waiting for a limo, but then the property advisor misrepresented the private lake. She was worse than the limo driver!”

Martha Beck:
This is true. And that’s absolutely true.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I just wanted to do a shout-out for the 99%.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yes, yes.

Rowan Mangan:
And with that, we should move to our topic.

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So Marty, today we thought we would have a little natter about moving into a potentially chaotic and one might even say dangerous time in world history. Is that fair?

Martha Beck:
Yes, we’re nattering about the heart of darkness, essentially, and how do we live through it?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. Nattering about the heart of darkness would be an amazing name, like the title for a book. Don’t you think? Nattering about the Heart of Darkness.

Martha Beck:
Except for the fact that no one knows what the word “nattering” means except you. And I only understood it because of context.

Rowan Mangan:
Well then everyone understood it because everyone’s in the same context.

Martha Beck:
It’s all context. Yes. Okay, get to work on that.

Rowan Mangan:
So we were just thinking about lighthearted topics like, how does one live through one of the darkest and potentially most dangerous times in history?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And we were feeling occasional, we were feeling quite lucid in between bursts of incredible blind panic.

Rowan Mangan:
Spasms of horror.

Martha Beck:
Spasms of horror. And we were sort of reading to each other from the internet, from the interwebs.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yes.

Martha Beck:
And we read this thing. It was a thing that frightened us.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but it was cool. It was actually quite interesting. So we were online reading this piece that was sort of saying, here are some things that when you live in a fascist dictatorship among the sort of things you want to cultivate are, and it said something about community.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that you need to really develop. It said start introducing your friends to each other, make sure everybody knows each other, and talks once a week with everybody to have a stable base of information.

Rowan Mangan:
And there were a bunch of suggestions like that, that were kind of super practical. And then he goes, “Oh, also make sure that during times like this, you’re really, really trusting your intuition.” And it was sort of interesting because he was saying it as though it was just another practical step.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
But it really stuck out because I think it would be fair to say our cultural training wouldn’t lump those things together. The other ones were critical thinking—what’s disinformation?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. What’s the potential disinformation coming now? What’s propaganda? Are we being gaslighted at any level? And very sort of academic, almost scientific ways of looking at data.

Rowan Mangan:
And it was just so interesting to me that in this piece that was otherwise, I guess, fairly hard edged, you could say, there was this little nugget about “trust your intuition.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And that, he said it just matter-of-factly, “And your intuition will be heightened.” And that’s so unusual because we’ve been taught those things are opposites, logic and intuition.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, yeah. So you would expect the culture to say yes to the one thing—the critical thinking skills about is this disinformation or whatever, but would not say “in times of collective danger, your intuition will be heightened and you need to listen to it more.” That’s not the way of the culture, that’s not the voice that the culture usually speaks in.

Martha Beck:
But it made such good sense to us because we started talking about, okay, what does our intuition feel like? We talked about this in another episode too. This is slightly, we’re going a different direction with this one. And we started saying, “What does our intuition feel like and when is it heightened?” For me, one of them is travel because I’m in a disrupted situation in unfamiliar circumstances. And things may happen to me intuitively when I’m home that I don’t notice. But when I’m traveling, because it’s chaotic, I seem to be more open to it. And the last time I was in Johannesburg, I ordered a salad. I ate one bite and my whole body said, “Don’t eat that.” And I was like, it’s my vegetables. I have to eat my vegetables to be healthy. So I ended up with a fun and frolicsome pet aboard in my intestines. And if I had just not eaten that, if I’d listened to my intuition, maybe I wouldn’t have had that visitor within. And I don’t mean intuition. I mean parasites.

Rowan Mangan:
I had some visitors when I was in India.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, travel again.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. Also interesting stomach conditions at various times. Yeah. When I was 25, I traveled around India by myself for about three months. It was going to be longer, but there was a bit of a tsunami that happened. “It’s terribly inconvenient for my travel plans.”

Martha Beck:
Oh my goodness, where was the chauffeur and the receptionist, the tsunami receptionist?

Rowan Mangan:
So inconvenient. But yeah, so for three months, and I was 25. So I still, I look back and I think that was interesting that I did that, backpack on my back, and there were definitely a few gnarly situations. Because I think often my main personality, the main part of my personality, has a slightly underdeveloped sense of danger. But it was like during that time, so one of the things that I did was I wore a ring on my wedding ring finger the whole time.

Martha Beck:
Oh, interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
Because that helped as I’m sure that any woman who’s traveled alone in any culture could imagine how that helped. But I was sort of thinking about this and I was thinking really that whole time, there were so many moments where I went to get in a taxi and then I didn’t. I got out again. Or I started to go down a certain street and then I just stopped and backed up and went. And it was like what you said about when you’re traveling and there’s that disruption, those senses are heightened. I think that I spent that whole time in that state and wasn’t even articulating it to myself. I was really just steering by [vocalizes] like that. With those noises.

Martha Beck:
You were in a “bewildered” state—in the pun sense of that word. Because if you were an animal in nature, you would always be listening to your intuition. Because the way, and we talked about this in the other episode, we tend to get locked in thought and in the stories we’re telling, and then we don’t even know where we are, let alone the tiny nuances of what’s going on around us.

Rowan Mangan:
And a particular type of thought, which is that verbal thought.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. These groove stories that our brains play over and over again and they actually make us blind to what’s actually in the present moment. But when you are fully attentive, when you’re fully present, you get tremendous amounts of information warning you in very subtle ways sometimes and in sometimes rather obvious ways, but not in a way that our culture would consider normal. So it’s not somebody coming and telling you something. It’s not that you see a clue on the ground. It’s that your spider senses go ding-ding-ding and that’s real, even though we don’t have language for a lot of the ways in which it arrives. Spider senses work as well as anything.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And do you think that when there is, I don’t really know how to characterize this, but when there is a time like that where you could say there’s danger or there’s disruption that not only are your senses heightened, but there’s more information coming at you?

Martha Beck:
I think there is. Of course, it’s impossible to test whether it’s just heightened attention or whether there’s actually a bombardment of clues. But actually my true basic belief is that yes, in times of chaos when you’re very attentive, you actually—more information comes to you. It’s almost as if you become—sure, your attention is heightened on things, but you’re also magnetic to them. And that, I think, has something to do with the fractals of consciousness and the way our thoughts interact with the environment. Oh, I get very California about this, but I’ve experienced it so often that I have enormous amounts of very improbable things happen to me when I’m in an endangered state, when I’m really alert, and when I’m really present. I do think more stuff happens.

Rowan Mangan:
But not just danger, there’s something else. There’s something else that we haven’t quite put our finger on. Because the other night when we were reading this article and we were freaking out about the planet is in this precarious place for many reasons, and it suddenly occurred to us talking about intuition and trusting your intuition, that we actually have already gone a number of steps into a story that we’re living about being in the process of responding to intuition and intuitive impulses that come in through synchronicities and all of that. We are actually already doing that and we hadn’t even recognized it.

Martha Beck:
And it’s happened to us periodically. And it has marked the dramatic changes we’ve made in our lives. And what I love about the story we’re living now is that it’s about the positive side of listening to your intuition. There’s no fear. There is in fact a sense of joy and fun that goes with it, but it’s also very confronting in terms of us making some major changes in our life.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So we thought we would just talk a little bit about this thing that’s going on because it’s strange, certainly to the eye of the culture, it would be considered strange.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm. So you want to tell what happened?

Rowan Mangan:
Do you want to go and think about what you’ve done? I do. I went to a concert not so long ago. I had never heard of the place where it was, but it was within driving distance of where I live. So off I went with someone else. And from the time I arrived in this town, and I have to say I had no expectations. I was looking forward to the concert. That was it. That was all I was thinking about and a cool, fun weekend-away experience. From the moment I arrived in this town, I noticed that—I’ve lived in a lot of different places in my life and I was seeing the names of streets that I’ve lived on everywhere, including—

Martha Beck:
All in this one city.

Rowan Mangan:
All in this one town, including—I cannot explain, so the street I grew up on in Melbourne is called Fyffe Street. Spelled F-Y-F-F-E. That was one of the first things I saw.

Martha Beck:
I’ve never ever heard of it spelled that way before.

Rowan Mangan:
So that was one of the first things I saw when I came into the town. And that’s I think probably why I was attuned to seeing all the others, but it was like oh my God, that’s the name of the street that I first learned my address was when I lived on that street. And so I used to recite it. So there was that. And then the next thing that happened was that everywhere I went, I had these explosively warm conversations with strangers everywhere. And they just immediately, it was like, “It’s you, it’s you, oh hey!” It was this really intense sense of connection with people. Strangers kept giving me random compliments, super random. I wear these things in my ears that are called sleepers in Australia. They’re, you put them in overnight, they’re nothing, they’re just placeholders for when you do use earrings. And I had this young guy, young guy come up to me and just say, “Excuse me, I love your earrings.” And I couldn’t understand it, but it was a really out of control, love fest everywhere as I went about in this town.

Martha Beck:
I wrote about this in a book once. I called it the “You You You phenomenon.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then I met an Australian woman who was working in a shop and she just happened to say, “Oh yeah, I mean I’ve lived in a lot of places, but nowhere is as great as living here. This is just a really special part of the planet.” It was all this stuff. And then the other thing was that it was the end of fall, just late fall, and the streets of this old town were lined with these bright, bright yellow, ginkgo leaves, those leaves that have that really particular shape.

Martha Beck:
Ginkgo biloba.

Rowan Mangan:
And they were all over the ground. So they were littering the ground, these bright yellow just everywhere, carpeting these old streets. And it felt meaningful and important because I was totally on board the magic by then. And I brought a few of them, these leaves, with me and sort of pressed them into a book and took them home because I was so into it. I was just so into this weird experience I was having in the town.

Martha Beck:
You told me you were going to get a tattoo of a ginkgo leaf as a pledge to yourself that you would go back to that town someday.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, yeah, I’d been thinking about it. And so I was very impressed by these. I took a lot of photos of them. And there was such, I think one of the big things for me was everywhere I looked, there was a really strong sense of local community there. And there was this church and it was like an old church, old, old, old, old, old, old. And it’s there and it’s functioning as a church, but then outside there’s a sign that says, “Come for a mystical sound journey here on Saturday night.” And then there was a sign next to that that said, “Community free food, community lunch every Saturday.” And so there was just this such a strong sense of community. And actually outside that church, there was this thing that they’d set up that’s wild. I’ve never seen anything like this. I dunno if you’ve seen this sort of thing before, but there was sort of like a bulletin-board-type thing, and they had all these sort of labels, like you would, anyway, these little bits of paper and you could tie them to a thing. And there was a sign that said, “Give a prayer, take a prayer.” And so there were literally hundreds of these little blue label cards. And so I just went up and put my hand on one and it said, “What you seek is seeking you” from Rumi, which is an expression that we have thought about a lot in terms of destiny and big moments and everything. And so I think it was then was when I sent the first text to you and Karen saying, “I think we might be moving to this town. ”

Martha Beck:
We get these texts, “Hi, we got to the town and I think we will move here.” And I was like, “What?” And I said to Karen, “Why is this happening to us? We’re having a distressing enough season without having to move house.” And Karen said, “Oh, she just, you know, let her play. Let her imagine things. She’s not serious.”

Rowan Mangan:
You know what she’s like. What were the vans?

Martha Beck:
I was thinking, I feel like I have a new identity coming on. And I was obsessed with a certain historical figure, a fabulous feminist, anti-racist, literati, whatever. And I was just obsessed with this person. And I joined Ro in New York City because we were on our way to Boston. We had a gig. And I was like, “Okay, it’s nice that you went to this cool town, but I’m obsessed with this cool person.” And she said, who’s that? And I said, “Oh, you’ve never heard of her?” And I Googled the person. Guess where the person lived during their whole life? In that town! And I was like, huh?

Rowan Mangan:
And we’re in the elevator in our hotel going off to this interview that Marty had, and I was going to be helpful nearby fluttering about, and I was telling her about these ginkgo leaves. And she was saying to me, oh, well it’s interesting because Ginkgo, that’s a symbol, in Asia, I guess, Japanese?

Martha Beck:
Ise in some places, it’s considered a sign of prosperity or long life.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, like abundance. We’re like, oh, that’s nice. It’s a nice abundance thing. And so we’re chatting about it and we are waiting outside the hotel for our Uber. And it’s like Boston Waterfront. I mean it is just city.

Martha Beck:
Just cement.

Rowan Mangan:
It is just buildings.

Martha Beck:
Everywhere. Nothing growing.

Rowan Mangan:
There is not an organic thing within a country mile.

Martha Beck:
And on this huge stretch of concrete, we look down at our feet while we’re waiting for an Uber and what is there? There is one perfect golden ginkgo leaf. And then we were in the airport and I was—

Rowan Mangan:
Wait, wait, wait, just hang on. Steady. The ginkgo leaf was there. I mean, take a second. That was insane.

Martha Beck:
I know. There was not a tree.

Rowan Mangan:
There was no tree for miles.

Martha Beck:
There were no other leaves, not a single other leaf.

Rowan Mangan:
Nothing. It was insane. So yeah, so we see that, we freak out, we get, Marty does an amazing interview. We go straight to the airport.

Martha Beck:
And I was standing guard with the bags outside the ladies’ room while you were in there. And a woman came running up to me and she said, “Oh, my wife was just telling that I should read your books. I can’t believe it.” And then you came out and she’s like, “Oh, I listen to Bewildered.” And we were hugging and having a festive time and we went off to meet her wife and we started chatting.

Rowan Mangan:
It was actually weirder than that because she was in her own crazy moment of where she looks at Marty and she’s like, “I am so sorry to come up to you, but I’ve just been on this flight from LA to Boston with my wife, and we’ve been sitting there on the plane and she’s been telling me the order in which I need to read your books.” So it was like, so she was in this “That’s freaky” kind of space already. And she’s like, “Can I just ask you to just come meet my wife? She’s just over there.” So we go over and we become instantly obsessed with these people. They’re just the coolest people. They’re going off to Lake Como to some sort of global consciousness-raising thing, but they’re just super cool. So we’re like, “We love you, we want to be friends with you.”

Martha Beck:
And guess where they had just been the day before and taken pictures?

Rowan Mangan:
Same town.

Martha Beck:
The city, the town that Ro had fallen in love with. And I have to say, I just started feeling emotionally, strangely, joyful. And I have still never been to this place, but every time I thought about it, I felt so much better because it is kind of crazy. It’s a difficult dark time in many ways. But for some reason thinking about this place that I’ve never been was starting to make me weird happy, like strange happy. And that is how I think intuition prefers to give its messages.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Like in the same way that you can’t explain that leaf on the ground, you can’t explain why you feel happy about something that there’s no good reason to be happy about. And it’s almost like when something happens, even if it’s an emotion internally, if it’s something where the culture would say, “Well, that’s nothing, that doesn’t make any sense, so put that away,” that’s when you need to be going, “Oh, hang on. Maybe that’s something to that.”

Martha Beck:
That’s where you pay attention. When we were talking about this before we recorded, Ro said, “An autocracy, including any form of the structured oppressive patriarchy of any system, will never tell you to trust your intuition. Not ever. It wants control.” So just when the culture says, “No, no, no,” I like to say, “Ooh, but I’m happy.” So long story short, no long story still pretty long, we’re definitely planning to move to this town, but we just don’t know when or where exactly. We are standing by for further instructions. And it seems to be moving quite fast.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And we’re willing to—that is how hard we are willing to put our money where our mouths are.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. So we were so scared, we started paying more attention to our spider senses and our emotions and our environment, and information started coming to us.

Martha Beck:
And so Ro got this big hit. And one of the ways you can know that your intuition is tracking well is that one person will feel something and then another person will feel something, not because they’ve been fired up, but because independently—like I was looking into that historical figure independently, and it happened to match up and then a lot of different things seemed to happen. And we got home, we thought, “How are we going to tell Karen that we’re all moving to this town we’ve never seen?” And it turned out she had started feeling weirdly joyful about it too. And so Karen and I, we have gone through this a bunch of times. Ro has been doing it her whole life. And all of us have this relationship with intuition where it leads with joy and excitement and curiosity. And it only gets frightening like, “Get out of here! Don’t eat that!” when we ignore the happy signals. Like, I wanted ice cream, I ordered a salad to be good. The wanting the ice cream was actually, I think, my intuition. So go for the happy signals. Cave early. And so that’s what we intend to do.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and so, Marty, it seems like we might just be on the brink of doing another one of those things, right? Those wacky things we do that look really weird, but feel really good. So I hope all the listeners will stay tuned for the next installment of this story.

Martha Beck:
And please don’t forget, especially in the times to come, that your story is poking at you, and it’s trying to do it with joy and curiosity and fun. And if it can’t get that to happen, it will start to poke a little harder, and maybe things will start to go wrong. So pay attention to your intuition, which will be heightened at this time. Stand by for further instructions and…stay wild.

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.

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