Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

So today, what I wanted to talk to you about was the process of creativity, which I'm obsessed with in many ways.

But I was especially interested this week in the process

of creation as it applies to what we essentially are. So I've called this episode, What

Are You Becoming? But to be more accurate with the sort of theme of it, I thought it would

sound weird, but the theme is

actually, what is being made of me? So it's actually not as active as what am I becoming. And that gave

me a kind of a break because when I think, what am I becoming? It's something I have to actually

strive to do. But this week, well, let me set it up. So raised in Western culture,

like, you know, has it roots in the European Enlightenment, individualism, materialistic worldview,

all of that. I was raised sort of in that. And then you add Mormonism.

I don't think it's very weird. But basically I was raised in the Western culture. And that is all

about becoming and striving and working and making it happen. And whether you're looking at the

scientific or at the religious underpinnings, it's all about like having to go out and do something,

right? So then I, at 17, I started studying Chinese, very different cultural underpinnings.

Like there were people in ancient China who lived 10 miles apart from each other and spoke a

completely different dialect.

They all read with the same characters, but the pronunciation would sort of drift over time

so that different little tiny settlements would have their own separate languages.

And some, I mean, that's the, that is the really, like, crushing thing about studying any Chinese dialect I studied

Mandarin which is also called literally everybody talk but when I went to China

...