Wake Up, Human

Ep.21: [Short Story] A Red Truck, a Mountain on Fire, and Other People's Intuition

• Shannon M. Wills

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Have you ever had a moment where everything went sideways – literally? This storytelling episode takes you deep into the Guatemalan countryside where a borrowed red Toyota truck, a burning mountainside, and a muddy crevasse converge to deliver some fun insights about decision making and human connection.

The story explores how both intuition and experience serve as powerful guides when we face uncertainty, and how stepping away from our need to be right can sometimes allow the most creative of solutions to unfold. 

Shannon W.:

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 21 of the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon, I am your host, hostess and your storyteller. Today I'm actually doing something different for this episode be fun to just, from time to time, tell a story from my life, and you know, that's in contrast to the recent episodes and all my episodes really which are thoughtful and in-depth exploration of topics, and I love those. And I also just think sometimes a story comes up in my memory and I think, oh, I would love to just share that. There's some learning from that or there's something lovely in the story that I want to share, and I'm going to jump in and do that as an experiment in this episode. So if you like stories and I bet you do please stick with me and I'll see you on the inside.

Shannon W.:

Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Hi everyone, thank you for joining me for storytelling time. This is going to be a little bit lighter episode, I think, but I'm sure I won't be able to avoid talking about some kind of deep topic or becoming metaphorical about this story. But I have a story I want to tell you from my life. As I mentioned, this is a new idea for the podcast that I'm going to explore, so if you like this or you have any comments or feedback, get in touch with me and let me know what you think. You can find me at shannonwillscom Just send me a message or you can DM me on Instagram at wakehuman.

Shannon W.:

Before I continue, I want to say I actually want to dedicate this episode to someone. This may seem like an odd dedication, but it's really on my heart and I want to speak this now before more time goes by. I want to dedicate this episode to Aaron Bushnell. He's the United States Air Force active duty member who set himself on fire outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC in protest of US involvement in the genocide in Gaza, and I want to send some love, so much love, to Aaron Bushnell, so much love to his family, his friends. I have so much compassion for him in that he felt that that is what he needed to do to share the message that was on his heart, on his conscience, in his bones. I can't even imagine the kind of courage that would take. And even though this episode is not about this issue, I do think I'm going to be talking about Palestine next week, in next week's episode.

Shannon W.:

But this is so fresh in my mind and there's a little wound in my heart right now around the fact that we are so broken as a world that someone feels they need to set themselves on fire in protest of inhumanity. So just praying. I'm praying for each other to see one another's humanity. Every life is sacred. Every life is sacred. So rest in peace, erin Bushnell, and may your sacrifice not be in vain. May your sacrifice not be in vain.

Shannon W.:

Okay, with that said, let me shift gears and I'm going to tell you a story. So it's speaking about our humanity and being able to witness each other and see each other's humanity. Stories are one of the most beautiful and one of the most ancient ways that we can do that for one another, for one another. When we speak our stories and when we hear each other's stories and when we feel heard, that's a healing activity. We heal back toward our innate humanness. When we share a story, it takes us way back to a time when we were all part of an oral culture, before we had writing, before we had typing, before we could Google information. We passed information between one another and down the generational lines through storytelling. It's in our DNA and it's a way of reconnecting to our roots as human beings and meeting each other where we both began. So the storytelling can be an emotional, a psychological and a spiritual reconnection to our roots as human beings. And it's also fun. Who doesn't want to hear a story? If I tell you I'm going to tell you a story, did something perk up in you Like, oh, she's going to tell a story. Yeah, I want to hear a story. Yeah, like we're programmed to want to hear that for each other. So I'm saying stories are a way that we can heal back toward our innate humanness. And I don't know about you, but I could really use some healing right now and what I was just saying about our world. I think we can all use some healing and so maybe we can all use some stories too.

Shannon W.:

Right, our rational and scientific culture tends to minimize the value of stories. Yes, we have movies, yes, we have novels, but those tend to be something that we do for entertainment and not as a necessary act of human being. And I want to reclaim the story as a necessary act of human beingness. It's not just entertainment. And if somebody says, you know, we actually have this built into our language where we say, oh, that's just the story, and we use this in a lot of ways. And, yes, we can tell ourselves stories that are not true and there's a wisdom to looking at ourselves psychologically that way. But I want to also reclaim story as meaning. When we share stories, we share meaning, and that's the definition of story that I want to live by. So now I'm going to really tell you this story.

Shannon W.:

So this story happened when I was in Guatemala. So I lived in Guatemala on and off for about two years, and this story happened at one of the times that I actually went back to visit afterward and I was visiting some friends in Rio Dulce, which is along in the water as much as I possibly could, because it was so, so hot and so humid and so sticky. So I was staying at the home of a friend and the friend's mother, the woman who owned the home, her name was Donya Lillian. Dona Lilian had a red truck. It's this little red Toyota truck and it was from. It was one of those old little two wheel drive Toyota trucks, probably from the nineties or so, and she had a truck. Not very many people had vehicles in that town and so it was really special that she had a truck.

Shannon W.:

And I found out about a place that was not far from Rio Dulce. It was about an hour away on a dirt road and it was. I heard it was a beautiful place with a waterfall and a river that went through a canyon, and I heard that if you go to this place you can actually float down the river on your back and it will float you down through this canyon. You go up to the head of the river, you put yourself in the water and then you come out the other end in this beautiful kind of waterfall area and I, of course I wanted to go there.

Shannon W.:

So I asked Doña Lilian if I could borrow her truck to drive to this river and I was very fortunate that Doña Lilian and I had a friendship between us and she trusted me. She really trusted me and she said immediately sure, yeah, you can take my truck. Just, you know, be careful and have fun. And I took this very seriously, that she was loaning me her truck for this trip, and I wanted to be very careful with the truck and that was my intention. So I found a friend to go with me.

Shannon W.:

I asked all around and everyone had other things to do, all the ladies had things to do, all my girlfriends there and one of my guy friends, david. He was able to go. He was one of the younger guys and I think he just he didn't have a family yet and he didn't have as many obligations I don't think he had a job and he said sure, I'll go with you. So David and I, we got hopped in the truck, we drove ourselves to this place and we hiked up to the head of the river and we put ourselves in the river and we floated down the river with our backs to the river and our faces to the sky and we snaked through this beautiful canyon and it was exactly the idyllic paradise that I imagined. And we got out of the river happy, dried ourselves off and we headed back toward Rio Dulce.

Shannon W.:

So, as we were driving, this is where the story gets good we're driving back toward town and I'm driving and the road itself, it's a dirt road, it's very muddy. As I said, it's wet and humid there, so it's very muddy. And on both sides of the road there's this expanse of, you know, ferns and greenery and lush Guatemalan flora, and then alongside the road there are these huge ruts, but they're not ruts, they're more like crevasses, because the road is packed down, they've machined it to pack it down. And then, between that and the wildness of the greenery, the landscape, there's an area where the road wasn't packed down and the land starts to sort of fall apart and you can just see when the rains really come, it just splits and cracks, almost like you would see in an earthquake. And so there's the road and there's these big cracks on both sides that are like three feet wide, and then there's this beautiful landscape.

Shannon W.:

Off to the side and up to the left side of us, there were hills, the land rose up into these beautiful green, forested hills and with palms and so many other kinds of diversity of plant and animal life in these hills. And I was driving along, but I was also really enamored by the beauty of the natural environment there and the hills, and I looked up to the left because I just my eyes were drawn to the hills and I noticed as I looked that the hill was on fire. The hill was on fire and I knew exactly what it was when I saw it. It was the hill was being burned. What the people there in that area were doing at that time, and probably still are, is that they were burning wide swaths of the landscape there to make way for raising cattle there. To make way for raising cattle, because the people there are very, very poor many of them and will find anything that they can do to try to make money. And if someone has a piece of land there or somehow is able to burn a piece of land in order to raise cattle, then they can use the cattle, the beef, the dairy, the milk, the cream, the cheese as a source of their income. And so I understood what was happening and I understood why. But I was always so heartbroken when I saw something being burned or I saw some smoke wafting up from the hills, because I knew that that's what was happening, that this beautiful forest was being burned to make way for cattle to help people survive. And so when I looked to the left and I saw this burning mountain, I felt it hit my heart and my eyes were just transfixed and I was staring at it with this painful feeling in my heart, just staring, and I stared so long that I forgot that I was driving and at that moment we went from driving to suddenly.

Shannon W.:

Suddenly the truck was sideways and I was up in the air. It happened so fast I didn't even realize what was going on. I had hit, I had gone off the road and I had hit one of those ruts and the rut was so big that the side of the truck completely fell into the rut. So David was down in the rut. So we went off the right side of the road and it tipped. So I was in the air and David was down at the bottom. I literally looked down at him and he was. We looked at each other like, oh no, oh no.

Shannon W.:

We got out of the truck and of course, you know what I was thinking. I was thinking, hey, I wrecked the truck B. What are we going to do? Oh see, oh my gosh. What about Doña Lilian? She trusted me. Everything just hit me like a cascade and we got out of the truck, david and I.

Shannon W.:

We stood there and looked at it. We looked under it to see does it look like it's broken? Did the axle? Is the axle bent? We couldn't tell, because it had sunk down into the mud in such a way that we couldn't really see the underside of the truck and we couldn't tell how damaged it was. And so we stood there and we talked about it. We're like what are we going to do? And as we discussed this, david had an idea about what we should do. He said you know what? All we need to do is just wait here. And if we wait long enough, then another truck will come by and it'll be full of a bunch of big guys and the bunch of big guys will get out of the truck and they'll lift the truck out of the mud and put us back on the street.

Shannon W.:

And I, when I heard that, I was like that's the most ridiculous thing I'd have ever heard. Why would you think that a truck full of guys, big guys, is going to come by and they're all going to get out of the truck and lift it out of the ground. I said that is, we can't wait for that. You know it was it was afternoon at that time, it was probably three or four and you know it starts to get dark there pretty early about six o'clock. I said we can't sit around and wait for some truck full of dudes to come and pick us up. I said we're going to have to call a tow truck and he just laughed he goes a tow truck. Really, you think there's going to be a tow truck here? There's no tow trucks. We'll be lucky if there's even a tow truck. There won't even be one in town. We'll be lucky if there's even a tow truck. Even there won't even be one in town, we'll be lucky if there's one like within hours of here. That's ridiculous.

Shannon W.:

So we both thought each other's stories were ridiculous and we were standing there waiting and art. We were kind of arguing like what's the best thing to do? Maybe we should start walking, you know? And um, and we heard a rumbling behind us and we turned around and, I kid you not, around the corner came a truck full of big dudes. The whole bed of the truck. There were probably eight guys in there and they were all big old guys and they pulled over and they were like hey, what's going on? You need some help. Tavi just looked at me like uh-huh, who's doubting me now? Huh, and I could not believe it.

Shannon W.:

The guys jumped out of the truck, got under it, got around it, lifted the truck out of the mud, sat it back on the road and then they couldn't resist. I'm sure this is such a culture of machismo there, but they couldn't resist telling David you shouldn't be letting the woman drive. They laughed. They thought it was so funny that this woman had driven off the road and that's women drivers. And of course, david didn't even know how to drive. He didn't even have a driver's license. So their statements were ridiculous. But they had a real laugh at my expense and we didn't know if the truck was going to drive. So they looked underneath. They were like, eh, it looks fine, you guys should be okay. And we were like, well, we're just going to have to trust it. So Davia thought the whole thing was just hilarious. He was just ribbing me about it.

Shannon W.:

We hopped into the truck, the truck's totally covered with mud and just a mess, a mess, and we're like, well, we got to get back to town. So we start driving and we start going around a curve, another curve, another curve, maybe two minutes, and again I kid you not, guess what we saw? There was a tow truck parked along the side of the road. There was a guy in the tow truck eating a sandwich, and he watched us drive by and he just gave us a little wave, and David and I looked at each other and we were like what, what? And of course, I was like see, see, I knew what I was talking about. I knew what I was talking about. There was a tow truck, right? So here we're, both like, yeah, I was right.

Shannon W.:

And so, before I continue on with the story, I just want to say, right, there are some things about this story that are so incredible to me, because, yes, both of us seem to have an intuition about what we thought was the right thing to do, and for both of us, though, it was also based on our experience. Right, david came from a place where it was apparently really common for trucks full of big guys to drive around on dirt roads, and I come from a culture where it's common that if your vehicle breaks down, you call a tow truck right. So was it our intuition or was it our experience that led each one of us to decide what we thought was the best thing to do? I don't know. I mean, this could be looked at as a question of nature versus nurture, but, like so many things in human nature, I think this is complex. We can't tell whether this is nature versus nurture, intuition versus experience, and experience is not also a type of nature? And so the answer to that is maybe both, and we're complex and multifaceted and multi-talented as human beings. Who knows where that knowledge that each of us had within us came from? And I don't want to overanalyze that too much, because the truth is, I'm not going to know. But what I do think is amazing is that when we're in a moment of unknown look, I think both intuition and experience can guide us. I think they're both superpowers. We don't need to prioritize one over the other, but I think we do need to nurture and develop both of them if we want to be able to respond to life intelligently, if we want to be able to respond to life intelligently.

Shannon W.:

So in our culture we often give a lot of respect to experience Like. I know this because I lived this. But we don't often give the same respect to intuition, to the gut feeling, to what's inside of us and responding to the situation based on unseen criteria, right or an unseen knowing. Even we just know that we know. So if we want to be able to respond to life fully when our car tips sideways in a rut in the mud next to the burning mountain, don't we want to have all the tools at our disposal that we possibly can? Don't we want to have experience and also intuition? Because what if we haven't experienced that? What if I would have been by myself? I wouldn't have known to say well, I'm just going to wait for a carload of guys to come by and pull me out of this thing. Experience isn't going to be able to guide us. Reason might guide us, reasoning might give us some ideas about what we could do, but reasoning can also overshadow intuitive knowing and guidance. So I just want to give a plug here to the intuitive and to the unseen knowing.

Shannon W.:

In a world of over-rationalization and when there's no Google Maps, you know and there's no phone number to call and you're stuck in the middle of nowhere and you're sideways, literally or metaphorically. What do you do? Well, a lot of times we may have nothing more to go on than our internal GPS. I personally think that we are all in conversation with the greater web of life, with this greater organizing intelligence that knows much more than we do, that connects us to each other, to past and future, connects our internal knowing to our external knowing. And there's a term I heard recently from Tokopah Turner she's a Canadian Sufi dream worker and she used this language of naturing that the intelligence of life can nature through us, meaning that it's not coming from us but that it's coming through us and guiding us toward what we need to know and what we need to do. Isn't that a beautiful concept of the intelligence of life naturing through us? It's just really recognizing that we know more than we think we know.

Shannon W.:

But we need to be open to knowing more than we think we know for that knowing to come through us and for us to actually recognize it as real knowing. So I don't want to go too deeply down that rabbit hole, but I do want to recognize in this story also that when we are open like that, then we can be open to other people's experiences as well as our own. So in this story, I had my own experience and my own gut feeling about what needed to be done. David had his own experience and intuition about what needed to be done. David had his own experience and intuition about what needed to be done, and we were kind of arguing about who was right, who has the best plan, what do we need to do when that makes sense. But what the story illustrates here is that it's wise of us to be open to other people's experience and intuition too. Look, it turned out that there was truth in both of our perspectives.

Shannon W.:

So you know, we're really individualistic in our western culture and it's it's wise to be able to be open, especially in moments of crisis where we're facing the unknown and we're really not sure what the best thing is to do. It's wise to be able to be open to the experience of others. When they say I've been here before and this is what I learned to be true, even if it doesn't totally jive with the fact that I've also been here before and I also have something. I need to be true. And in our culture we're so individualistic, so it's easy to follow into this conditioning that we have.

Shannon W.:

We have such a conditioning of us versus them, and black and white, and especially this idea that for me to be right, someone else has to be wrong, doesn't want to be right, and that almost has us programmed to be walking around in our lives looking for ways that the other person is wrong. And we see this everywhere, don't we? As soon as something is a conflict, as soon as something is painful or scary or unknown, we're like who's wrong? And we don't want it to be us. But what if we can both be right? Yes, but what if we can both be right? What if we take a step back from the modern individualistic culture that we've been programmed, so many of us have been programmed in, and we settle back into the bones of our ancestral knowing, of our indigenous roots that we all come from and those more communal ways of knowing where right and wrong aren't so black and white, where there's a possibility for more than one thing to be true? There's more room for paradox, and we may not be able to see it in the moment, but we can allow into our minds that more than one solution might be true.

Shannon W.:

So if we stay in that individualistic point of view, we can stay stuck in a place of no solution. David and I could have literally stood there and argued about it. I mean, okay, granted, the truck with a bunch of dudes did come around the corner and pick us up out of the mud, but if that hadn't happened and we both wanted to argue about who was right we could have stood there and argued about it all into the darkness, and we would have been sleeping in the truck by arguing about who had the best solution. We could have become stuck in a place of no solution. And can we see how many places we're stuck in a situation of no solution in our world today? When we really need to find a solution for something, there's a very real and serious problem, but because both sides are concerned about being right, the solution doesn't happen. It's just a perpetual fight for who's right, and in the meantime, the problems of our world go unsolved and all of us, on all sides, suffer. So let me just put a final plug in here, for can we just forget about who's right and who's wrong? What if we assume that both perspectives have truth, that both perspectives have some wisdom in them, and what if we agree to tap into that truth and that wisdom together to find a solution. Wow, what kind of world would we be living in today?

Shannon W.:

So back to the story. I promised you a story and I'm going to give you the end of the story. I bet you want to know what happened to the truck. Right, we drove past the tow truck driver. We had a big chuckle about that. We waved at the tow truck driver.

Shannon W.:

We drove back to Rio Dulce and I was really worried about bringing Doña Lilian's truck back to her Broken. And fortunately, david, he had grown up in town, he knew right where to go. He took us to a place where they washed cars and they were just getting ready to close for the day. Actually, it was getting pretty late by that point, but they knew David and they said sure, we'll stick around and we'll wash the truck for you. They washed it, they waxed it, they shined it, they detailed it. It was thick and spam, it was shining.

Shannon W.:

And while they were doing this, davi called a friend of his who was a mechanic and had him come over and look over the truck and surprisingly, blessedly, the truck was unscathed. There wasn't even a scratch on it. It had just been dunked in the mud. It felt like a miracle. So I was so happy and I paid the car washers, I paid the mechanics, I dropped off David and I took the truck back to Doña Lilian and she was thrilled to see her truck. She's like it's never been so clean. Oh my goodness. He went above and beyond and I did tell her that. Well, one reason that we needed to clean it up is because I ran off the side and I kind of hit a rut in the mud and it got pretty muddy and she just laughed and she goes oh yeah, that's life in Guatemala. I didn't tell her how deeply it had gone down in the mud or why I ran off the road because I was staring at a burning mountain. But it didn't matter. Everyone in the end was happy. We got our adventure, we learned some lessons and the truck and everyone else lived to see another day. And that's it for my story.

Shannon W.:

Everyone, I hope there was something fun or interesting in it for you. I hope you enjoyed story time and I guess my message for us all is let's not let those superpowers go to waste. We're capable of so much more than we realize and if we share those powers and we combine them together and if we stop trying to decide whose superpowers are better and who's right and who's wrong, we can find solutions to every single problem in this world. That's how powerful we are. That's how powerful we are. If you like this episode or this podcast and you know someone you think would benefit or enjoy it, please share it with them. This podcast is a labor of love for me still, and I'm thrilled if it can be a benefit to someone else. I am honored to be waking up with you. The world needs every one of us to open our eyes and our hearts and find the solutions that we need to heal our world. Blessings and best wishes, and I'll talk to you on the next episode. Bye for now.