Nature, Take the Wheel

Summary

Podcast Summary: Bewildered — “Nature, Take the Wheel”

Hosts: Martha Beck & Rowan Mangan
Date: March 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this engaging, laughter-filled episode, Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan explore what happens when life as we know it is upended—when the “house” we’ve built (literally and metaphorically) collapses, and we must decide whether to rebuild what’s lost or surrender, letting something wilder, more natural, and authentic arise. The episode tackles our cultural and neurological obsession with control, homeostasis, and making things “like they were,” contrasting this with nature’s ever-changing, regenerative cycles. Through stories, personal vulnerability, metaphor, and plenty of banter, Martha and Rowan challenge listeners to consider what it means to let go of the old and trust what wants to emerge—from the personal to the planetary, from aging faces to climate change.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Opening: Bewilderment, Loss, and Letting Go

• Theme Introduction (00:10): Rowan frames the discussion: how do we respond when life collapses and “we have to accept things are not as they were?”
• The “Wilder Way”: Martha proposes there’s an alternative to futile rebuilding—a wilder, more instinctive path rooted in letting go, not control.

Notable Quote

"There's an option open that is not trying to rebuild what can't be rebuilt. It's the wilder way."
— Martha [00:22]

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2. Personal Stories of Disarray and Bewilderment

• Martha’s Mind Slips (01:24–04:40): Martha shares her “random outbursts” and a fear of losing her mind (e.g., singing “Yes!” unconsciously after someone sneezes). Rowan reassures her that these are quirky, human moments.
• Plane Society & Vulnerability (04:51–08:43): Rowan lovingly mocks the micro-society formed on long flights and describes a moment when Martha, exhausted, asked a stranger at the airport, “I just need you to come home with me and look after me.”
• Musical Metaphors: They riff on how every plane could break into “Consider Yourself” (from Oliver!)—wishing for spontaneous communal bonding in mundane spaces.

Notable Moments

“You just turned around and looked her in the eye and said, ‘I just need you to come home with me and look after me.’”
— Rowan [07:19]

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3. The Metaphor of the Collapsed House

• Building and Losing “the House” (11:19–13:26): Rowan uses the metaphor of building a house (one’s life or identity)—and what to do when it (inevitably) falls apart, via job loss, aging, or even literal melting houses.
• Martha’s Melting House (14:46–17:57): Martha describes their actual house disaster—ice dams, leaks, and “man-sized” icicles flooding the kitchen. The house is a literal and figurative metaphor for life in disorder.

"Anything that happens to your house is a reflection of your inner life and anything in your inner life is going to be reflected in your house." — Martha [17:23]

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4. The Human Drive for Homeostasis

• Defining Homeostasis (19:33–22:31): Rowan and Martha explain our biological and cultural programming to maintain stability—how we desperately try to “put things back” after upheaval, despite nature’s constant change.
• Cultural Clinging (22:39–25:46): They use aging and beauty culture as examples—the billions spent to “return” our faces and bodies to a set point that no longer exists.

"For a while I felt like this was me and it looked the same, and now it looks different. And I can't tolerate that I'm losing my idea of what I should be." — Martha [23:50]

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5. Nostalgia, Culture, and Political Metaphors

• “Mar-a-Lago Face” and the Politics of Nostalgia (27:21–29:13): Rowan draws a sharp parallel between cosmetic surgery—trying to look like a nostalgic, non-existent “before”—and political nostalgia, particularly “Make America Great Again.”
• Illusions of Restoration (33:26–34:34): Martha points out we don’t remember the past ‘as it was’—just a fading copy of memories, shaped by mood and influence.

"The idea that we can go back to something better that is just like what you remember ain't gonna happen." — Martha [34:05]

"It's like what happens in the society is ‘let's hearken back to a non-existent time when things were simpler.’ Let us try and recreate on our faces a youthful glow that never really was, because that's not what youth is." — Rowan [29:08]

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6. Impermanence and the Nature of Change

• Buddhist Reflections on Change (30:16–32:39): Martha shares stories from Buddhism—meditating on impermanence, sitting with loss, and the pain of acknowledging transience, even as children.
• Memory as Simulacrum (35:08–37:40): Rowan introduces the concept of simulacrum—copies without originals—arguing that our societal nostalgia is spun from copies-of-copies.

“Your memory's doing [what old copy machines did]... just spinning in a sea of your own subjective impressions of things.” — Martha [35:08]

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7. The Quantum Leap: Letting Go for What Wants to Emerge

• Letting Nature “Take the Wheel” (41:47–43:01): They introduce the episode’s titular phrase as a counter to “Jesus, take the wheel”—inviting surrender and trust rather than frantic control.
• The Trust Fall (57:03–58:11): Martha describes the moment when we can do nothing but let go, and how grace or kindness always emerges—personally or communally—when surrender occurs.

“Nature, take the wheel. Is to surrender to what is wanting to happen out of this rubble.” — Rowan [42:55]

"There was a moment … when I was so disillusioned and so out of energy … I remember that always as a trust fall, where ... I would just let go of the cliff and fall. And sometimes the fall lasted a while. And then, God damn it, a stretcher from grace would come gather me up." — Martha [57:03]

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8. How Do We Do This in Practice?

• Book Recommendation and Narrative Surrender (46:43–49:02): Martha recommends Jonathan Miles’ novel “Eradication,” describing its meditation on nature, interference, and the futility of restoring what’s lost.
• Nested Metaphors and Fractals (49:23–50:09): Rowan explores how personal, ecological, and political stories mirror each other—like Russian or fractal dolls, expressing the same cycle at all scales.

“Unless we can accept and grieve what is over … that’s almost a thing we do in order to create the space that must be created for the new thing to be born.”
— Rowan [50:09]

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9. The Pain and Grace of Letting Go—Individually and Collectively

• Resisting vs. Surrendering (59:19–60:04): Rowan discusses activism and resistance, noting that sometimes resistance just reinforces the “thing”; true change can require putting down the rope and surrendering.
• The Power of Community (62:24–65:33): Martha recounts a harrowing, redemptive story: after being rescued from a fire, she breathes oxygen offered by other struggling survivors—collective grace embodied. They discuss how surrender and acceptance, when done together, bring forth a “mighty kindness.”

“Somehow when you do it as community, that's when the grace comes forward most strongly.” — Martha [64:15]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Metaphor and Loss:
  “Monkey’s sad. Monkey's sad because house fell down.”
  — Rowan [40:28]

• On the Paradox of Nostalgia:
  “It's not necessarily about looking younger. It's about looking familiar to yourself. And you don't.”
  — Rowan [27:56]

• On the Trust Fall:
  “You go from one state of matter to another in a boom of energy. That’s literally what happens at the molecular level. And when you have to do one of these falls, you are falling into an energy field that is becoming a different element.” — Martha [58:30]

• On Community Transformation:
  “When we all accepted where we were, people who had hated the babies on board started giving [each other food] … Like suddenly, people, when they went into acceptance, were like angels instead of devils.” — Martha [61:26]

• On Hope and Wildness:
  “It’s a weird kind of hope, but it’s a hope and what it really is ... is letting nature take the wheel.” — Martha [65:21]

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Important Timestamps

• Metaphor of the Collapsed House: [11:19–13:26]
• Melting House Story (Literal & Symbolic): [14:46–17:57]
• Defining Homeostasis, Aging & Resistance: [19:33–25:46]
• Political/Cultural Nostalgia: [27:21–29:13]
• Memory and Simulacra: [35:08–37:40]
• From Grief to Grace: [57:03–58:11]
• Community Surrender & “Mighty Kindness”: [62:24–65:33]

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Conclusion & Takeaways

• Acceptance is not Apathy: Letting go is not “giving up”—it is, paradoxically, the act of making room for grace, renewal, and the “mighty kindness” of community.
• Culture vs. Nature: Our struggle is to loosen the grip of rigid, nostalgic, controlling culture and trust the wild, natural cycles of loss, grief, and rebirth—both individually and collectively.
• Grace Arrives in Community: The most profound support, transformation, and meaning often arise not in isolation, but through vulnerability and surrender within a community of “bewildered” others.

“When we do, that's how we stay wild.”
— Rowan [65:34]

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For further exploration:

• Eradication by Jonathan Miles (book recommendation)
• “Zero Circle” by Rumi (poetry on surrender and grace)

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Stay Wild.

Transcript

[A]

Hi, I'm Martha Beck.

[B]

And I'm Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered. You know that you've already pressed play on it. You know what?

[A]

It is a podcast for people trying to figure it out.

[B]

Yes. And today we're trying to figure out what to do in those moments where everything collapses around us and we have to accept that things are not as they were.

[A]

Yep. And we probably can't make them as they used to be. But there's an option. There's an option open that is not trying to rebuild, but can't be rebuilt. It's the wilder way.

[B]

Okay, let's do this.

[A]

Hello, the lovely peoples. This is Marty, Martha, inviting you to a free masterclass that I have made called five paths to your purpose. Probably the most common question I get from people is, how do I find my purpose? Why don't I feel that I'm on purpose? Well, it turns out there are certain things you have to do to find your purpose, and I broke them down into five, and I made a little masterclass about it. So if you'd like to see it, just go to marthabeck.compurpose and you will be able to watch it without any charge at all.

[B]

So, Marty, what are you trying to figure out?

[A]

Oh, dear. I am trying to figure out if I am really losing my mind and coming unraveled in general or if I just have bad days because I've started doing this weird. It's not echolalia. Echolalia is where you just say random sounds because Karen does echolalia. Like, you'll say, let's eat, and she'll go, eaty weedy Wheaties. Like, just total random. But that's been from childhood. Right. But I started doing this thing, and I don't know what is misfiring in my brain.

[B]

Brain.

[A]

The other day you sneezed.

[B]

I did not.

[A]

No, you did. It's okay to admit it. It's okay to admit I did sneeze. And I always say bless you because, oh, I had a professor in college. It was in mythology and folklore. I took this class, and he was obsessed with doing all the folklore things. So you always had to stop and say bless you. And invariably, during each lecture with 100 students, someone would sneeze.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And he would stop and say, bless you, and then completely forget the thread of his life. And we would just sit there. And then when he started up again, his brain would misfire, and it was just agony. This one time he was going to say, the hero comes back from the. The Underworld. And then they clo. They bathe him and clothe him in a toga or a tunic, but instead he said, they clothe him in a tuna or a tonic. And then he just stood there on the stage, like, staring, amazed, knowing not what to say. And we all started shouting to him, toga and tunic. Toga and tunic. Anyway, the other day you sneezed, and in honor of this lovely, frightened man, I meant to say bless you, but what came out, I'd forgotten about. You see, I'm admitting this in public now. I just sat up, straightened my spine, opened my mouth, and sang. Yes. I was like, what? No one does it.

[B]

That's like.

[A]

No, that is nowhere. That is not what you do. It was horrifying. I didn't know what was happening to me. And then I was supposed to be doing a recording for something, and it was supposed to be punchy and on the, you know, into the, you know, 32nd beat. Yeah, got it. Yeah. Punch. Get my points across. And then at the end, I shouted yovel. Yovel, I think, is a kind of exclamation in German. I don't even know if it's good or bad. I think it's vaguely good. Yeah. Well, I just shouted this.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Randomly, exactly the same way. I sang not said, but sang. Yes. In response to you sneezing. I want to know what's wrong, Roby.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That attitude is not going to help me.

[B]

You're supposed to say, you're fine.

[A]

I do it all the time. Yes. Like.

[B]

Like, that was very funny. Like, there was that moment I sneeze. Hatchu. You looked up like, I got this one.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And then we both just, like, made eye contact for a long moment and went, did that. That's different.

[A]

I didn't talk about the underlying fear that I have truly lost my marbles. So I'm trying to figure that out. Yeah, it's happening.

[B]

Yovel, I think you're fine.

[A]

Yeahville. Just smack the table.

[B]

Yeah, you got to cut that out.

[A]

Anyway, what are you trying to figure out?

[B]

So, you know when you go on a plane for, like, a long flight, not a short flight, but when it's been, like, a number of hours together and you start thinking we're a society now, these people who are sitting around me, these are. When we crash in the Andes or whatever this is like, I'm gonna have

[A]

to eat these people.

[B]

I may have to eat these people and. But before that, I have to, like, be in society with them, you know? And so you sort of. I don't know, I mean, I'm realizing as I'm saying this, this is very much a me thing, but I'm like, yeah, you're going to be a problem on the island, you know, or whatever. And, and so. And I wonder what the equivalent in life is of the people who get up too soon and open their overhead lockers too soon and stuff like that. Like, you try to think, how's this going to play out on the. But anyway, so there's this kind of like, sense of where a society together, we're up in the air, there's just us, you're someone else, you're bound by danger and distance. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But then the weird thing happens, like you, you touch down and you are ejected into airport world. And then there's just all these people and it's like you have to pretend that you weren't briefly in love. Right.

[A]

With the 300 people on your plane.

[B]

Right. And we had an interesting one of these recently. We were in Costa Rica, we came home, it was night, it was suddenly very cold. It had not been cold in Costa Rica, it became cold in Newark, New Jersey.

[A]

Substantially less cold in Costa Rica than it was in upstate New York.

[B]

I think that's fair to say.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. It's bold, but fair.

[B]

And so we're walking out of the plane, we're dealing with like, losing our entire society to like, the hordes of airport people. We're dealing with freezing to death, all of us.

[A]

Costa Rica come froms.

[B]

All the come froms. And then, like, with love, sometimes three dimensional objects are a challenge for you. And, you know, there may have been like, you know, we were tired.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You know, everyone was tired.

[A]

What did I say? What did I sing?

[B]

Well, you were getting your bag on the escalator, your rollerboard thing, and I think you dropped something. And then there was a woman behind us who was part of our plane society. And there was just like, we were in airport mode, but we, but we hadn't fully transitioned into the mode of we're just strangers, we don't know each other.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

And so she picked up, I think your phone or something that you dropped on the escalator, and you just turned around and looked her in the eye and said, I just need you to come home with me and look after me word for word. I wrote it down because I was like, oh, the bewildered peeps are gonna be hearing about this.

[A]

Oh, dear. At least I didn't just sing it. At least I just said it.

[B]

That would have been really Interesting. Like, if you turned around and went,

[A]

come home with me, I know, it

[B]

would have been like, take care of me.

[A]

It would have been like some sort of Broadway musical thing. Do you know, like, I always wondered as a child, I would see musicals, and I took it very literally that these people. I just saw it as a regular movie. And then suddenly everyone would start singing. Like, I watched the Sound of Music. We didn't have a tv. I was completely. I just read books all the time. So I think I was at that moment where my child self knew that we were all supposed to start singing the same song.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Like, Oliver, Consider yourself one of us. You know, every plane. You should sing that on every plane. What if you just got in, plane takes off, you stride to the front, ostensibly to go to the lavatory, but then you turn around and you just start conducting a rousing version of Consider yourself one of us.

[B]

Flash mobs on planes. Why has this not happened? We have to do this. It's a lot of admin, but it will be worth it.

[A]

Oh, my God. That is going to be so cool.

[B]

It'll be so bonding for later when

[A]

they're like, you know, maybe we could repeat a number in the airport.

[B]

No, it's only for.

[A]

Only on the airport.

[B]

What happens on the plane stays on the plane.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

All right, let's do a podcast.

[A]

Let's do it.

[B]

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 you all have a great day now.

[A]

So we talk a lot on the podcast about coming to our senses, which sounds like you could do it by yourself, but weirdly, it isn't.

[B]

No, you actually can't do it alone. And I think especially right now, when everything out there feels very polarized and overwhelmed. Overwhelming and noisy. People really often don't have a place where they can just go and be completely themselves.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So.

[A]

And that's why we started Wilder, which is our online community, and it's for people who really want kindness and connection and belonging without the strident, divisive argument that seems to be everywhere these days.

[B]

Yeah. In Wilder, we explore a new theme every month to help us stay in touch with our true nature. And there are all these live events on Zoom that are so fun from, like, body doubling, co working parties, meditations,

[A]

teaches meditations and classes.

[B]

Marty does Earth School, which is brilliant, and frequent meditations that we do together. And it is just a group of people who are the best. So if you've ever listened to this podcast and thought, I wish I could go deeper with this, or I wish I could talk to more people about these kinds of ideas, or Wilder is where that happens.

[A]

It really is. So if you want to come join [e-mail] we would love to see you there.

[B]

So, Mari, what we're talking about today on Bewildered, the podcast that you and I are now doing.

[A]

Yes. Is no one sneezed. No one sneezed. Go ahead. What are we talking about is, you

[B]

know when you're building your house metaphorically.

[A]

Yeah. I never built a house.

[B]

Yeah. You would try, though.

[A]

I would be. Debacle.

[B]

Say you're building a house metaphorically. Okay. And. And in this metaphor, your house is just like. You're going along in your life. You're building your life in whatever way.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You're doing this. This is what your family's like. This is what your work is like. This is what your home is like.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then one day, there's an earthquake, and Metaphorically. And the house that you've been building is rubble around you. Right. So this could be. To just, like, decode the metaphor. This could just be you're. There's all these layoffs, and suddenly you're laid off from your job. Like something right. Big completely interrupts your happily going along.

[A]

This comes in and takes out an entire department, and you no longer have a job or something.

[B]

Right. And so this has happened. And I think what we can say is, like, the human tendency and. And the cultural teaching is that you now will pick up those. That rubble of that house, those blocks, and attempt to refashion them into the house that you had in your mind. That was coming along quite nicely.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And this sort of makes sense to us, but what we want to talk about today is that moment when the rubble is around. Like, what's. What's happening there in the. In the largest sense is potentially in the scheme of things, something's coming to say, that wasn't the house or the house wasn't going that right. The right way. And we want to talk about that moment and what we need to do in that moment when the meteor falls on our life. Right.

[A]

And we can't rebuild it.

[B]

And the fact that you're not supposed to try and make it what it was.

[A]

Maybe. I mean, I don't think we can state that as an absolute.

[B]

Oh, I can, yes.

[A]

Does this have anything to do with the fact that our house is melting right now?

[B]

No, it's just a metaphor.

[A]

It is literally melting, folks. There is something called an ice dam in nature. I'm sorry, I have to stop and talk about this. I'm finding that it's like stuck in my throat and I have to say it. We had just lived through this massive, massive blizzard. There were. There was like three feet of snow on the ground and it was desperately cold. Like, I. I had talked to you about. I know cold. I've been in Boston. I lived in Boston. This was actually worse than anything I experienced there. It it. When we came back from the jungle two weeks after the blizzard, none of the snow had melted because it had never been even close to the temperature at which water melts. Right. Except that. And here is what you told me that I'm now going to tell you as if I didn't know it, because it's for the edification of our listeners, if on your house there forms an icicle the size of three strong men. Okay, so think of an icicle now. Make it the size of three strong men.

[B]

Like standing on each other's shoulders. No, no.

[A]

Shoulder to shoulder, gripping the. The edge of the roof. It is not a hugging situation. There's no warmth. And this is the key. It is very cold outside, hence the massive icicle. But your house is kept at a temperature in which you can survive. Barely, but you can survive. And that means that it's warm enough to melt water. And so the water from the icicle begins to melt not out of the house, but into the house.

[B]

Because, I mean, really, it's only forming an icicle in the first place because of the warmth coming from the house. Because otherwise it would just. I don't know.

[A]

I'm not a building scientist. You can call those building science. Ro keeps saying we've got to call the building scientists.

[B]

The building scientists have ghosted us.

[A]

Yeah, she's convinced that she left them in a room too long and they have decided to spurn us.

[B]

No, they have. I've been emailing them.

[A]

I know, but I don't think it's. You spurning them. I think they looked at that damn house and went, this is not. We could tank our entire careers by looking at this house.

[B]

Yeah, well, they've ghosted us.

[A]

So, yeah, the building scientists, while we were in Costa Rica and Karen was home with Adam and Lila and she called us and said, the house is leaking like we're getting. And we thought, oh, a busted pipe.

[B]

So we told them to immediately turn off all the heating

[A]

so they had no heat, no water. It's literally negative 5 degrees. It is horrifically cold. So much snow everywhere. Like you could not find your way through things. Anyway, it all starts dripping. So we thought, busted pipe. And the plumber came and the pipes were fine, but we had a massive man sized icicle that was creating a dam pushing melted water into the walls. And guess what? It's still happening. As we sit here, our kitchen area is full with pots and pans catching the water.

[B]

This is true. And you know, absolutely, definitely the truth. Now I just need to be really clear. There are two houses in this podcast so far. One of them is a metaphor for life. The other one is something's bad in our house, but it's not related to the. To the lifehouse metaphor.

[A]

Or is it?

[B]

Well, I. You know what? Let's find out.

[A]

I personally believe, and I deeply believe this, and I said it on Oprah show once, if people remember the Oprah show.

[B]

So if you think it's not true,

[A]

I said it on the Oprah show.

[B]

It's been said on the.

[A]

That anything that happens to your house is a reflection of your inner life and anything in your inner life is going to be reflected in your house. I think there's something really messed up that's making me sing. Yes. And making icicles flood into our house.

[B]

Anyway.

[A]

We can't even go out and try to hack the icicle because that would void any potential insurance. So we just literally sit there. The wall is torn open. There are all these electrical things with the water running gaily through them.

[B]

I know I'm a good listener and this might feel like therapy, but I

[A]

need to be quiet about it.

[B]

Yes,

[A]

yes. It's involuntary. Oh, God. Yeah. It's like a sneeze. All right. Anyway, maybe it's a metaphor, maybe it isn't. But the point is, and you make it solidly, everyone goes through a time. Goes through many times, I think, when everything goes to rubble, when it's not just that the car needs to. Needs a tune up. The car falls off a cliff and is no more. Gotcha. How does that this is also a metaphor. Kind of Thelma and Louise.

[B]

Yeah, but you're not Thelma or Louise in this.

[A]

No, I'm the car. You and Karen are Thelma and Louise. So now. So this is what you were saying, and I completely deviated.

[B]

I'm Javi Keitel running towards the cliff

[A]

going, no, I forgot he was even in it. It was like you mentioned someone random, like Paul Newman. I was like, oh, boy. Paul Newman is so old. No one's ever. It looks like Paul Newman and, like, Louis XIV are in the same category in most people's minds today. I'm trying to get to the point.

[B]

I love how all our reviews are, like. They're so good at staying on point.

[A]

They're really. They really.

[B]

Like.

[A]

Do people actually say that, or are you being sarcastic? I'm being sarcastic because it's like they. They literally cannot stick to the point. Yeah. These MF women.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. The point, and I don't know why you ever steered me off it, is that we all have these times of, like, oh, our life looks really trash, like. And we need to make it the way it was.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Make it the way it was.

[B]

Yes. And this runs through our cultural training, which is homeostasis. Actually, do you want to just form, like, be Encyclopedia Brown for me and just define homeostasis for me? Because I feel like it's.

[A]

Homeostasis is a. Is a state in which.

[B]

State of homeo.

[A]

Yeah. Which we would know about because we're homeos. It's a state in which an organic system can basically move on in its current pattern without much deviation, and it is going to be solid and stable.

[B]

Yeah. It's like a comfortable status quo of, like, yeah, this is how life is going along. And that's. And that feels right even to our little cultured minds and our little monkey brains, because we're afraid of everything and we're afraid of change. But if we look to nature, the great teacher, we would see that change is constant. Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that's actually that homeostasis is the aberration.

[A]

Well.

[B]

Or change is the homeostasis.

[A]

No, not quite. I'm going to.

[B]

I'm the homeo.

[A]

Yeah, you're the stasis. Okay. The thing is that we are so programmed that, for example, if we get cold, we find a way to warm up. If we get hungry, we eat. If we get restless, we pace around. There is an internal drive to maintain the homeostasis of our bodies and of our minds as well. We do constantly correct to bring ourselves into Homeostasis, it's not always easy, but, you know, emotional regulation is another one. Like, you find ways to stay in this zone where you feel like everything's basically okay. So when something goes to use the

[B]

language of Internet memes, despite the horrors, there is always look at phone in bed.

[A]

That is true. That is true. And we do all these things that help us go back. And they've done really interesting studies which I think are widely known now, where if somebody is. They did one study where they looked at people who were paralyzed from the waist down in accidents and people who'd won the lottery. And they looked at their emotional state right after the incident, the paralysis and winning the lottery. And of course, it was very different. Deep grief and sorrow versus elation and happiness. But a year later, their happiness was basically equal. It was homeo. It was stasis. It was basically back to the level they'd been before this thing happened. If they felt miserable and wretched before winning the lottery, they felt that way again. If they felt basically happy before being paralyzed, they'd risen to that again. So we do kind of go. There's this illusion that there is not constant change that we're in, that we can sustain things the way they are. And I say this every single day because somehow my phone has intuited. Perhaps because it can see my face.

[B]

No, because you click on these things and it knows your pattern.

[A]

Maybe once I did.

[B]

Oh, come on.

[A]

Once. But it is.

[B]

I've seen the packages arrive at our door.

[A]

Nothing but this constant stream of products that purport advertisements for products to make a female face look slightly less old. And it's like everything they show the before and after, and every single one of them shows that you look 50 now. You will look 30 after you smear this on your face. And nobody ever does. I don't know how they get the before and after photos. I don't know what they're doing.

[B]

AI.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. But the idea is. And you will get here too. Like, I think the vast majority of people get to a point where they. You basically in homeostasis from like 25 to about 45. And then it's just every day it's what fresh hell is this? And. And all those products, billions and billions of dollars are just trying to make it like it was, make it like it was, put it back the way it was. Because for a while I felt like this was me and it looked the same, and now it looks different. And I can't tolerate that I'm losing my idea. Of what I should be.

[B]

I'm gonna write a self help book. Really quick money, easily, easily won. As everyone knows. That's a sure thing. So I am 45 years of age.

[A]

Yes, you are.

[B]

And there's research that there's. You do have a massive, like, fall off a cliff of aging. Like, very fast aging happens. 44, 45. And I can vouch for that. And I went for a brief period down a bit of a rabbit hole about something about my appearance that I don't like that I'm not going to mention because I don't want to draw attention to it.

[A]

That's right. Oh, my gosh. You mentioned it. You just feel like I'm March for life.

[B]

I'm now trying not to refer to it in any body language.

[A]

I don't even know what it, what it is. I don't.

[B]

And I, you know, I, I explored different ways to try and deal with this thing that had begun to happen that didn't used to happen. And I finally just said to you after, like, and I made phone calls to ask people, can they help me with this issue? And I, I said to you one day, I was like, I think I'm at the point where it's either surgery or self acceptance. And that feels like, you know, did

[A]

you make that up?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I thought that was like a meme from the Internet.

[B]

No, I made that up. Surgery or self acceptance?

[A]

Surgery or self acceptance? Yeah.

[B]

And I still haven't decided.

[A]

And guess what you still want? Because it really is like, I don't. What?

[B]

I don't accept surgery and I don't accept self acceptance. Like, neither of those.

[A]

This is exactly the topic we're talking about. Like, do you try to build it back to be the way it was? And here's what I have been telling myself since. Since I was like 20 years old. Don't do it, Martha. Number one. Because you're supposed to be, like, on the path to enlightenment. And it would look really stupid if you, like, showed up with five pounds of filler in your face. Yes. I'm just meditating on it. Deal with it. Impermanence is a thing. It's like the number one noble truth of Buddhism.

[B]

Impermanence.

[A]

Deal with.

[B]

So much easier to embrace before it starts happening to you.

[A]

Right, right. I know, but I just kept telling myself, because I was living in Phoenix where there's a ton, you know, wealthy retirees who are getting a little bit older, and the wives are all gorgeous. And the wives, it's kind of a Stepford wife, kind of, like, experience. You never. Sorry. Phoenix is wonderful. It's just got very strong sunlight. It ages you.

[B]

He just broke through. When we break Drew, the producer, that's

[A]

when we know that we've gone to identical twins in an airport.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

One of them lived in Phoenix. You could tell because the. They looked exactly alike, but the Phoenix one looked like 93 years old, and the other one was 30. Sun exposure. It's not your friend. Okay, wait. Back to what I was saying. Tuna, toga or a tunic? Back to what I was saying. What was I saying?

[B]

No idea. Oh, toga and tunic.

[A]

Now. Oh, I remember. It's this. I would look at people walking around after their facelifts, and they did not look like they looked before the face lift, but they also did not look like they looked when they were 20 or 30 or 40. No, they looked like something different, and they all looked exactly alike. Because, like, I don't know about this, but I think the plastic surgeons are like, I will give you this face. It is the ideal face of the world. And the women say, yes, yes. And then they come out looking like somebody made that face out of skin, but not nature. This was something else.

[B]

I have just realized something really profound, and I'm going to be super, like, much more explicit about political stuff than I usually would be in order to make this point, because I just think it's so fascinating. So the put it back how it was urge that we have when something happens which is analogous to my face is changing. Put it back the way it was. It's not necessarily about looking younger. It's about looking familiar to yourself. So you do these changes to look familiar to yourself, and you don't.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But what I just realized is, in America, we have a special term for that appearance now that we didn't used to have, which is mar a Lago face. Oh. Which you either know or you don't know what I'm referring to. And if you Google it, you can Google it. And what strikes me as so interesting because of my political science, like, bent. Is that the. All right, I'm gonna say it. One of the things that. That aspiring fascists do is they create an artificial sense of nostalgia for a time gone by when things were simpler.

[A]

Perfect. They were perfect. They were perfect.

[B]

Everyone was white. No one was gay.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

There was, like, a homeophobic stasis.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

And. And so the. In America. Let's just call it make America great again, like philosophy, which works with Mar a Lago Faith. And it's like what happens in the society is let's hearken back to a non existent time when things were simpler. Let us try and recreate on our faces a youthful glow that never really was. Because that's not what youth is.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's just so fascinating the way that culture is, is doing contortions with itself in order to avoid recreation, reinvention, reimagining of something into something new. And that's kind of what, what I want to push towards in this conversation is when everything is rubble around you, including your own aging face, what if that in that moment, we're being asked to imagine something completely new? Right. We're not supposed to get the rubble and try to approximate the house that was. That house is gone, man. And the hardest thing about these moments is you have to put down such a weird callback to an earlier episode. You have to put down the ducky if you want to play the saxophone.

[A]

Right? Yeah.

[B]

And so, so. And there's so there's like grieving the dream, right. And grieving the illusion of homeostasis that you had five minutes ago.

[A]

And I think it's particularly desperate this, this resistance to impermanence and this obsession with holding something in place. I mean, this really is one of the major issues that is addressed in Buddhist meditation. You sit there and you contemplate impermanence. They'd send people to go sit in charnel houses where dead bodies were and sit there and acknowledge that, that as you start aging, that's where you're headed.

[B]

I love that you've got this story from somewhere that you read about, like kids growing up in, in Buddhist families and they're like, I love my bike. And the parents are like, it's just

[A]

gonna rust and die.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's from Yonge Mingar Rinpoche. And he's like, he's been called the happiest man in the world. They tested his brain. He's like happy forever.

[B]

His bike is doing terribly.

[A]

But his dad would tell him, you know, this is your new bike. It's gonna die. I remember when my oldest child was three and I took them to meet a friend of mine, and the friend had a little dog and Kit played under the table with this dog for like an hour. And then when we had to leave, Kit stood up and very solemnly said to my friend, I really like your dog. I hope it never dies, because that's

[B]

where permanent takes you.

[A]

And I fought that from childhood. I was fighting it. Clearly, I passed that on to my spawn My offspring. I remember the first time I had to write a poem for a poetry contest in high school. I was so tense I did not sleep for five nights and they had to put me on Valium.

[B]

You are such a little nerd.

[A]

Yeah. And people think that I must enjoy writing because I write for a living. But I wrote this is my first poem ever about transience, my word for impermanence.

[B]

And then a few years later, dictionary's word for impermanence.

[A]

A few years later, when I was in my first serious romance with a guy, he said to me, this guy who was very politically liberal and very like, tapped into the needs of the masses. And he said like, what makes you saddest in the world? And I said, transience. He was like, that's awful. And I'm like, yeah, but isn't it the worst thing you can think of too? Like, doesn't it hurt us all? He thought I was talking about unhoused people. Transient, transient people going through like hobos.

[B]

It's the worst thing in the world.

[A]

15 year old woman, like, I.

[B]

It's hobos.

[A]

Oh my God. So yes, there's this whole. There is the biological pull toward homeostasis and then there is a culture that does not lean into impermanence the way like Tibetan culture does, but pulls so hard away from it that it's like life hack. Build your muscle more. I'm never going to age. Look, I'm injecting stem cells. Look how I'm exercising my brain. I have the brain of a 12 year old.

[B]

You know, like, and they.

[A]

That's another thing I see advertised, by the way. 12 year old brains play this stupid game where you spell words on a board and your IQ will age you backwards.

[B]

All right.

[A]

I don't think it's absolutely true, Ro. I don't think it's true.

[B]

Yeah, but it is, it is an interesting little piece of like ethnography, you know that here we are where everything we see around us that is. Is sustaining capitalism.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is about if you just like pedal backwards, you go backwards. That's not true.

[A]

It's not true. And since you brought up politics, I'm going to say this, and this might not be very popular either. Whether you're on one side or the other. The idea that we can go back to something better that is just like what you remember ain't gonna happen.

[B]

Yeah. And it wasn't what you think.

[A]

It was never. Do you know, I was just reading a thing yesterday that. Which I'm still grappling with. You don't ever remember what happened to you. You remember your last memory of what happened to you. And every time you remember something, you edit it and you spin it a little based on your mood, based on what you've learned, based on what you feel. And so when you're remembering what, like what America used to be like, what you're really doing is you're referring to your last memory of what America was like.

[B]

And it was fun, which was what Fox News told you last night.

[A]

But it's, it's like when we. Again, very ancient reference. We used to have copy machines where you had to put ink toner on them and print them out. And every time you made a copy

[B]

of purple and it smelled good, and

[A]

if you made a copy of a typed sheet, it was reasonably legible in this sort of purple ink. But then you'd lose the original and you'd have to make a copy of a copy and it just started vaguely. It started to vague out and the more copies you made, the worse it got. That's what your memory's doing.

[B]

Do you know what a simulacrum is? Yes.

[A]

Tell me.

[B]

It's a copy for which there's no original. Frederick Jameson.

[A]

I did not know that. I thought I knew, but I didn't.

[B]

Post modern literary theory. It's like you, you have reproductions that just go around in a circle and there's. They, they never. There's another term for it. Like it's, it's like there's no referent for all the referrings.

[A]

It just spins.

[B]

And that's like part of what's so up in our society is that, you know, and that's the Mar a Lago face. It's like it doesn't bear any resemblance to either what came before or anything.

[A]

You're just swimming in a sea of your own subjective impressions of things.

[B]

Yeah. And actually on the memory thing, that's so interesting because just in the last few days I've been thinking about what it must be like to be like a touring musician. And like, if you're a songwriter, right, you, at a certain point you wrote a song and it was in some way a reflection of an experience, subjective reflection of an experience that you had. Right. Arguably. And. But then if you then spend the next 25 years of your life, you know, periodically on tour singing that, and it's like every time you sing the song, you're changing the original experience that the song was about, but you're also in relationship with the last time you sang it and the Time before and the time before, and those things are referring to each other. And to a certain, certain extent, like, that has more heft at the end of the day is all the retellings and re. Singings than the actual original experience, which was just a moment in time. And I was thinking about, have you seen those things online? Where? Well, it's not online, but that's where I saw them. I guess they get like, a human body or something, and they, like, slice it super thin.

[A]

Okay, is this like a comedy?

[B]

Or maybe this is a dream I once had. They slice it all super thin.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then, like, encase it in, like, super thin plastic or something.

[A]

This is getting weirder by the feel. Like, keep going. I need to know where this is going.

[B]

Say it's like an art exhibit. A human body that's been sliced.

[A]

Jesus Christ. Where do you go to look at art?

[B]

So from the side, this body is just paper. Yeah. Just slices hanging from the ceiling. But then if you turn in the front of it, you see.

[A]

Yeah. This is. You see the whole body. You see foreshorten. And it looks like the whole body.

[B]

Thank you. Yeah, sort of. I mean, I'm. I'm very. I'm very disturbed by my own, like, pulling that as an example out. But all the layers is what I'm trying to get to. Like, all the layers of. Where we refer to our ideas of things that are. And. And then we call them the thing.

[A]

Yeah. And you, when you meditate enough, if you meditate enough, you. To see that you're slicing and slicing and slicing and recombining, and it's all sort of arbitrary and it's moving all the time, and you start to lose your grip on what reality is.

[B]

And actually, I quote, unquote, reality.

[A]

Right. Doing that now. Yeah. I mean, you know, we talk about how nature is coming to our senses and culture is coming to consensus. What we're talking about now is the multitude of memories inside you building to a consensus that supports what you're thinking because it can be spun any which way.

[B]

That's cool.

[A]

And you're sort of. We were talking about this yesterday. I was, like, really upset about something. I have no idea what. Yes. And you were like, marty, you are turning every memory, every reference into exactly what you want it to mean. And I was like, I know. That's how thinking works. And you were challenging me to stop doing it. And I was refusing because I wanted to be upset that our house is melting. Basically, that's what I was upset about. The house Is melting. And I don't like it. I don't want it the way it was before. I want it the way our last house was before. Or my most recent memory of our last house.

[B]

So there you go. And it's interesting you just said, lose your grip on reality. Because isn't that a cult, like an expression of the culture? And the way that our psychology is, we have to grip it. And even if it's falling apart, we're, like, gripping our memory of the thing. And. And I think what's really interesting is I'm excited to talk about, like, what is Right. Coming. But before you can get to, like, what is wanting to be born there, you have to let go of your grip on reality. Right. You actually have to reach the point of saying, this is finished, this thing

[A]

that is no longer, that is coming to your senses. To stand in the rubble and not say, this is something that has to be put back the way it was. To stand in the rubble and say, this rubble. I'm living in a universe of impermanence. Nothing once totally disorganized ever goes back to its prior order. Not exactly. Here I stand in the rubble. Where does nature take me from there?

[B]

Yeah. And I think what has to happen before anything else is the sadness because we are still living in these primate, like, creatures. And monkey sad. Monkey. Monkey's sad because house fell down.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. And. And so you go, oh, monkey. Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And. And then once the monkey has, like, truly let go of that, that's where I feel like, shit gets interesting.

[A]

Yeah, I think it does.

[B]

Because then you get to. You get to be like. Or what I like to be like.

[A]

Yes. Yes.

[B]

Is pretend that there is an intentionality here. Like a greater matrix of cause, effect, meaning, and. Yeah. Intention of something wanting to be born through this collection of circumstance that we're calling the rubble of our life as it was. And what if instead of being in our little cultural left hemispheres of I have to know and I have to build, and we're just like, what is wanting to happen here?

[A]

Like, what knocked down the house so it could build something new? And what are its plans for this place?

[B]

Yeah, and I love that sort of like, you know, I'm going to be the pencil in the hand of God, is one way to put it. Or just like the, you know, whatever.

[A]

Or just trusting, I mean.

[B]

Or just trusting. Okay.

[A]

Yeah. It's like when we were talking about the house, you paraphrased the Christian statement, jesus, take the wheel, and you said, nature, take the wheel.

[B]

Nature Take the wheel.

[A]

And that felt deeply, bizarrely comforting to me. And it always does when I get to the truth of impermanence and just collapse into it. Not just to say everything's gone, but to say something bigger than me. Take the wheel.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And, like, it's. It's important, like, because the original thing is, Jesus, take the wheel. And what's really important to remember about that is that Jesus couldn't drive. He had no knowledge of, like, not even. Not even an automatic. Not even, like, a little, like, big go cart.

[A]

Which wheel do you think he took? Like, which of the four wheels on the car did Jesus take?

[B]

Oh, my God. That little bastard. He stole our wheels.

[A]

Well, I think that's the point, that if you let nature take the wheel, it's gonna take the wheels. The wheels will come off. I'm blending metaphors.

[B]

The wheels are already off. They're off.

[A]

The wheels have come off.

[B]

Nature, take the wheel. Is to surrender to what is wanting to happen out of this rubble.

[A]

Yeah. And I really think that is a place where you can either cling to the side of a cliff or jump. And you don't know what's down there. You don't know if it's water. And you'll be fine. Warm water, like a cliff diver. Or if you're gonna. It could be a nice, warm ocean. Like, you wouldn't want to fall into the North Atlantic that way. Hey, you're messing with my metaphor. It's a beautiful metaphor. You're on the cliff. Everything.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

All is lost.

[B]

Don't jump off cliff. That's not what we're endorsing here.

[A]

No, it's a metaphor. Yeah. But there is this moment where. Well, actually, there's a lot. If Martha Beck jumped off a glyph, would she jump off? And what I'm saying is you should, but you can. There is a long period whenever anything falls into rubble where you have a choice between wanting to rebuild what was there. And maybe you don't even have a choice. Maybe you can't help wanting it.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

But there comes a moment where you can say, it's time to let it go. It's time to let it go. And that has been depicted as a moment of pure loss in a lot of our particular cultures, art and even psychology. But what you're saying is there's a level deeper. There is a deeper level of meaning that is happening right there. And something. When something falls to rubble, it's because something else is about to arise. Am I misstating it?

[B]

Yeah. And I think, like, if the house, or the house in progress were to still stand, it's impossible for us in that situation to dream up something completely novel.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so the house gets, you know, hit by the meteor or the earthquake or whatever in order for us to be able to enter a state that can imagine something that's never been imagined before, whether that's for our life or our planet or, you know, and both, I feel like more and more, I feel like it's both. Like everything is a microcosm of the macrocosm of everything. And so I. I find it. It's like there's the grief, which is like, key.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then. But then there's also. Even in the grief, if we can hold on to the. The sense that this had to be in order for something more beautiful to happen. The reason that I'm so attached, ironically, to this idea is very much connected to where we are in the political moment as a society, is that you can look back, you know, 10 years or one year or whatever and say, if things had gone differently there. But what you have to like, for me, the way that I personally can find meaning in what's happening at the. The level of.

[A]

Of.

[B]

Of society is that that house was already bullshit. That house was already unstable. It wasn't a good house. We thought it was.

[A]

We've been wanted with it.

[B]

We wanted it to be.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But we have the capacity to make something that's genuinely, just genuinely beautiful.

[A]

So how do we do that?

[B]

I will tell you right after this. Marty, you were saying that you had like a. There was a book you were reading recently that was going through this kind of process.

[A]

I cannot recommend this book enough. It's so rare that you find a book that is so well written and so important and so fresh. It's called Eradication. It's by a guy named Jonathan Miles. And everyone out there must read it. And it's about a man who is sent to an island where. Well, this is right at the beginning of the book, so it's not going to be a spoiler, but somebody left some goats on this sort of rainforest island, and the goats multiplied and they proceeded to, you know, fundamentally change the ecosystem. And this guy is a conservationist. He wants to help with nature. And so he gets this job and his job, he finds out to save this island. He has to go eradicate the goats. He has to go. They give him a gun and they just send him to this island. And here's this guy who's been like, saving Baby pigeons in the city his whole life. And his job is to eradicate what has changed so that this island can be back the way it was. And he's like, he has to keep telling himself that story. But as he gets away from society and he's by himself and he's with these goats, his natural openness to what is starts to fight with his job and he starts to fundamentally question, can we make nature what it was before? And it's just the most beautiful evocation of what happens to him, like his internal shifting based on this and what happens on the island. You finish that book and you go, it's not ever going to be what it was. And there is a way, there's a way forward that is not nihilistic, that is not hopeless, but it's not what it was before. And it's sort of to deconstruct ourselves the way this man does into a state of openness. And so you haven't read it yet. It's brand new. Read it. Eradication Johnny Miles. But you were sort of talking about that as being the approach. So, like, at a planetary level, it's climate change and ecological destruction for humans in the political realm, like, that's where your obsessions are. That's where you like to study and think. So what do you feel about that here?

[B]

Well, I think it's. I mean, it's so interesting applying this to climb the climate. The climate, the ecosystems of the planet, because it's like, for people like us, that can really be quite challenging. Right. Of going. You know, the same principle applies that we.

[A]

The.

[B]

The surrender of. Of control.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

To what is. And, yeah. I mean, I just can't help feeling that everything is a metaphor for something else and everything is the. The same thing expressed in different forms at different scales.

[A]

Russian dolls. Nested Russian dolls.

[B]

Russian dolls. But like, there. There's also like hexagonal dolls that are still painted in the same outfit and stuff. It's not just scale, it's also like, expressed in all these different fractals, different shapes and, and ways. And even in story and even in

[A]

fable or whatever, you know, nature, take the wheel, means you're going to start seeing fractal after fractal after fractal. Nature works in fractals, Right?

[B]

Right. And so, yeah, it is super interesting to say unless we can accept and grieve what is over, even as the story feels like it's continuing and it may not be too late and all of this if we can actually make the call. I'm Calling it time of death 10:17am you know, like that. That's almost a thing that. That we do in order to create the space that must be created for the new thing to be born. Right. And so politically there's. One of my great political influences is musical theater. And back in. Back in Australia there is a brilliant musical. This is like the most niche reference I've ever made called Keating, about a prime minister that Australia had in the 80s and 90s called Paul Keating and who was a very, very unusual type of politician to rise to the top in Australia and had a very different kind of. He was. He was more cultured, more erudite than. Than Australia is used to seeing in those sorts of positions. So. So he was. But he was an interesting guy and quite fun. And what was the thing he said on the news? Sorry, this is a digression. But it's funny. He still has a really broad Australian accent, but he was criticizing someone years after he left office and he was on the news just for this sound bite of going. I mean, these bloody pre Copernican obscur. So the musical Keating about his career and. And he was ousted in an election that was very much in the spirit of Make America great again kind of instincts. And there's this beautiful song called Light on the Hill. And it's like him looking ahead at the inevitability of the elections because the polls are quite clear what's going to come. And he says, as a way of summing up the national temper is bring us back our comfy bloody country. Send us back to simple days of yore. Nothing alien or scary. La dee da or airy fairy. Just put it back the way it was before and that swinging back to a. Like we could say a conservatism that plays on the idea of a simpler time and a nostalgia that's been misrepresented.

[A]

I did not know that song. You've played me some of the songs and they're great, but I didn't remember that. But it's really interesting, that one line. Nothing alien or scary. La di da or airy fairy. I mean, you could just say it's a tossed in lyric. But here's the thing. When I have been standing in the rubble of my life and I've been waiting, sometimes I look to like, I think another person could rescue me. I could be like, I could sell a huge bestseller and get a lot of money or whatever. Like there are all these methods that I think I can use to find my way back and they all fail. You know, all those I'm trying to build out of the rubble. And it fails, and it fails, and I just go deeper and deeper into a kind of nihilism. And then instead of nihilism, there's something that is almost like grace, where it's like the back of it breaks, and. And you just are like, okay, well, now that's a lethal injury. And you lie down and let it die. And without exception, what comes in to save or to build something better, and it always happens is something alien and scary. La di da or airy fairy. It's always, like, weirdly miraculous. And it's so weird because I write self help, and I always end up bringing people to that cliff and saying, jump off. And then I become alien and scary. And my editors are like, this is Lottie Dynamics. This is Lottie. Dina, give us something solid. Come on. Give it to us in the way we were taught to think. And I can't, because it's never worked for me. And my favorite poem about this is from a Sufi mystic, Rumi. Most people listening will probably know Rumi, but it's a poem called Zero Circle. And it starts out, be helpless, dumbfounded, unable to say yes or no. Then a stretcher will come down from grace and gather us up. And later it talks about lying mute in a zero circle, and miraculous beings come running to help. And the zero circle. What an interesting image. You were talking earlier about the spin of ideas we get into. It's when the spinning stops and you are just lying in the zero circle. You don't know anything. You can't go any which way. You're just still.

[B]

Also the still point in the turning world to bring Eliot into it. Right. There is something like we're grasping to find. And poetry is so often the only way you can kind of represent these things where, like, what is the state that we must become in order to allow? And in that same Rumi poem, he talks about, and we shall be a mighty kindness. And that's how I feel like, because I'm talking about politics, but I'm also just trying to find a way back to my own idealism, Right? Absolutely. It's not really a granular, analytical thing. It's like trying to believe in the goodness of human beings.

[A]

Yeah. And in the sustaining capacity of nature. I mean, I was. Before politics even entered into it. I was grieving the ecological destruction. I mean, there's a lot of this going. Going on.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, it's a really fucking interesting moment in history to be alive. And informed. Yeah. And so it does feel like, you know, and the other thing, speaking of, like, poetry and how these things can be expressed through poetry, there's the thing of, you know, when I'm between a rock and a hard place, let me be water. And I sort of feel like the rock and the hard place is the impossibility of going back is the rock. And the inability to see what's next is the hard place. And the only thing we can ever do is to try and transcend the.

[A]

The.

[B]

The. It's the head to head of those two impossibles.

[A]

It's so interesting to have that visual image because let me be water. You're talking about the rocks and the water. And I thought the word waterfall. When water is between a rock and. Well, wherever it is, it falls. And I was thinking how, as I look back over all my most recent memory of all the things in my life that have gone to rubble, there was this moment. And I don't know how to describe exactly how to do it, but I always wish someone would tell me how. So I'm going to say this anyway. There was a moment I was clinging to and clinging to steadily diminishing returns of trying to make it back the way it was. And then there was this moment when I was so disillusioned and so out of energy that I couldn't even jump. And I remember that always as a trust fall where I. Not because I wasn't afraid, not because I was sure I'd be taken care of, not because I could feel anything buoying me up, but because I had nothing else left. I would just let go of the cliff and fall. And sometimes the fall lasted a while. And then, God damn it, a stretcher from grace would come gather me up.

[B]

Yeah. And I mean, just to further torture the metaphor or confuse it, like, I also think, like, the moment where you say, nature, take the wheel is when you're going into a massive skid. Right. That's when you say, that's right, nature, take the wheel. It's not when you're happily, like, going along.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

At 45 miles an hour.

[A]

It is not like a moment that you hope for and yet it is the moment when you become a mighty kindness. Exactly. When you have a quantum leap between what you've been and what you are next. And I think that's the point of it, that it's not an incremental improvement. It is a quantum leap where matter changes its state. You go from one state of matter to another in a. A boom. Of energy. That's literally what happens at the molecular level. And when you have to do one of these falls, you are falling into an energy field that is becoming a different element.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I feel like in some way this is just a conversation about how we are to be in relationship with what is around us Right.

[A]

Right now. Especially.

[B]

Especially right now.

[A]

And

[B]

weak. And one form of that relationship is resistance to it. And I feel like on the political side, sometimes we can get in the most, like, well meaning way, we can get trapped in the resistance to it and people holding up signs that say resist. But I feel like, and I think I've talked about this on Bewildered before, but like, I feel like resisting the thing reinforces the thing. You're playing tug of war. You got to find a way to put down the rope. And. And so we can be pushed into the point where the only thing left is the trust fall. But I wonder, is there a way to choose it right?

[A]

There is.

[B]

Without having to get pushed to the edge of the cliff.

[A]

And first of all, I want to address that. People think ceasing to resist means apathy and not caring. And I could not be more. This could not be more different than that. I think. I mean, what this conversation is doing for me, because this is not scripted. I'm actually learning from you. Real time is that when we say to each other the unsayable thing, it can never be the way it was. And when we love each other through that moment, when we're on the plane with the other passengers and we say,

[B]

consider yourself at home, and like, something's

[A]

gone wrong and we have to land in a different city and we're all going to miss our connections and we're all not getting home tonight. And you look around and there's resistance, resistance, resistance. And then everybody says, okay, this is the way it is. And at that moment, the plane, in all seriousness, becomes a society of people loving each other.

[B]

I'm gonna cry.

[A]

That is really true.

[B]

So true. That moment when you go, I have missed the connection.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the relief.

[A]

Missed the connection.

[B]

And the relief of not trying to think, well, if I just. And I can. If I can get off. And then I'd run and run and. And you just go, no, I've missed it.

[A]

And I've seen this happen where one time I was on a plane that got rerouted to some southern city that was really hot. We had no air conditioning. We were on this plane for six hours and we were supposed to land in Chicago and we couldn't. And people who were raging at each other because they were inconvenienced and angry and frustrated and scared. When we all accepted where we were, people who had hated the babies on board started giving their, you know, here's a candy bar. Can this keep him quiet? What can we do to keep you cool? Like suddenly people, when they went into acceptance were like angels instead of devils.

[B]

And when you accept and do the painful surrendering that takes us to the point of acceptance. That's when you are accessible to the new idea. It's only once you drop the rope that you can be the vessel through which the new thing is born.

[A]

Oh my gosh. You know what I just realized too? That's never happened to me when I'm alone. I've always thought it was an individual thing. I just was remembering. Sorry. Totally different story. When I was caught in a high rise fire. I was pregnant. I had a little 18 month old. I collapsed. I was losing consciousness in this smoke filled stairway and somebody dragged me out. And there were pictures of it on the news and there was no one behind me. But I could feel myself being like, talk about a stretcher come down from Grace. But what happened was that they had an ambulance in the parking lot and all these people, the fire was in the basement. So all 10 floors, 13 floors I think had gotten smoke inhalation. And people's faces around their noses and mouths were black from trying to breathe smoke. And everybody was coughing. And a firefighter came and I was like lying on the snow coughing my lungs out because I was out of oxygen and my 18 month old was there. And he said, are you okay? I said, I'm not sure. I'm pregnant. I'm going to cry talking about this. He helped me get to my feet. He took my kid, he took me to the ambulance and he opened the back doors and the whole ambulance was full of people sitting there breathing pure oxygen to try to get back some of what they'd lost. They were all covered with soot, but. And he said, this woman is pregnant. Can anybody give up their oxygen? And every single person turned and held their mask out to me.

[B]

Yeah, that's the stretch of coming down from Grace, man.

[A]

And we are that for each other.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the reason I think that's important is you can give up on your own and say it's never going back and it's really lonely. But somehow when you do it as community, that's when the grace comes forward most strongly.

[B]

That's really interesting because it's like you're saying that we have to build a culture with each other, because culture is inevitable, in which we let go of the imperative of culture, which is to control and to keep things as they are. So can we come together in communities and allow everything that has been to fall away so that we can become a mighty kindness?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Take off our mask. Give you the mask. Yeah.

[A]

Give other people the mask. Like, start thinking, how do we function as a mighty kindness instead of a collection of people running through hell, hurting.

[B]

Yeah. Going.

[A]

We'll be fine. We can make this back the way it was before.

[B]

Just a couple more blocks on this. Just rubble.

[A]

Yeah. So, you know, there's. There's some kind of hope in that. It's a weird kind of hope, but it's a hope and it's what it really is. Coming off of nature and letting nature take the wheel. I'm sorry, Coming off of culture.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And letting nature take the wheel.

[B]

Yeah. And when we do, that's how we stay wild. We hope you're enjoying Bewildered. If you're in the USA and want to be notified when a new update episode comes out, text the word wild to 570-873-0144. We're also on Instagram. Our handle is Bewildered podcast. 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.