Ladies, Let's Put The Crazy Away
Yellowstone fans are surely familiar with the love story between main characters, Rip Wheeler and Beth Dutton. Beth is a firebrand of a lady who often uses shock and awe as regular tactics to fight for what her heart wants and her soul believes. Rip is a stoic cowboy oozing with masculinity and the ability to make tricky problems go away even while keeping his heart open. Between the two of them, there is no shortage of fireworks … of the dangerous and delightful variety.
While there are many notable interactions between these characters, one stands out for the purposes of our work here, my fellow Satisfied Sister. At some point in season five, Rip asks his beloved Beth to:
Put the crazy away
... After she inquires about going on an overnight wrangling trip with him. He says this now-famous line with a twinkle in his eye and love in his heart, and he knows exactly what he’s in for when he asks the question. He knows there is no “away” for Beth’s “crazy.”
She makes absolutely no response to his request to put the crazy away — which is astonishing, as Beth is so well known for delivering non-stop zingers. Instead, she waits. It is this moment of pause that I want to focus on here because she is so self-possessed of her intuitive guidance that she does not waiver in her desire to join him on the journey.
There is nothing crazy about her.
And, while her temperament may be wild and unpredictable, and her intuition and desire may be illogical to those (men) around her, she is a powerful woman unafraid to be herself. She throws shade that make grown men shiver and slays even young children with her words, all the while doing it from the depth of her soul and the openness of her heart. Call Beth Dutton unpredictable or callous. Call her unashamed or uncivilized.
Do not call her crazy.
Her unexpected pause after a line so well-known there are even T-shirts emblazoned with it on the show’s merch page reveals something purely magical:
It reveals the depth of Rip’s cherishing for Beth.
When that moment of pause doesn’t result in another clever comeback from Beth, he realizes what he must do. He must cherish her. He puts aside his own feelings in favor of hers, and cherishes her deeply by offering her sweet words, and a heartfelt plea that she accompany him on the two-day ride into the mountains of Montana.
Crazy is the word men use to stifle a woman’s intuition, to question her intentions, to recast her reality, and to belittle her emotions. Crazy is a word used to shame women, to make us devalue what makes us most powerful: intuition and emotions. Crazy asks us to rethink what we know … not from our logical minds, but from the depths of our soul.
Because what could possibly be valuable or worth knowing from a woman’s soul?
Every. Fucking. Little. Thing.
A woman who is tapped into her intuition and responsive to her emotions is a game-changing, life-altering tour de force. When that bumps up against the masculine desire for continuity and steadfastness, there will be destabilization. The feminine thrives in this space of movement, latitude, and circulation. When she is able to hold that space — Like Beth Dutton in the brilliant pause after Rip asks her to “put the crazy away” — the healthy masculine responds with cherishing…and change. He finds the new middle and holds that line for the feminine so that she can continue to dance around it.
This is how new pathways get built, new paradigms get shifted, and new ways of being are born. This is how the feminine finds safety, security and satisfaction in this crazy world.
