On Being with Krista Tippett

If hope is to be defining and forceful in the world we have to remake ahead of us, we must also speak hope into being. Ocean Vuong is a fascinating and singular person. The sweep of his work is about bearing witness to the other side of violence and the possibility of joy while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness to the fullness of what has been carried and what has been survived. And he is wise about the violence of language that is habitually, culturally instinctive — and how changing that is key to shaping our very presence to others and to this world. Journaling prompts for Session 4 As you move through these days, get really attentive in every moment to this world’s fluency in the language of violence — the vividness and omnipresence of words that engender fear and despair. Notice, and write down the easy metaphors of death and war that are used everywhere from the news to casual conversations to social media, about everything from relationships to politics to the weather. Notice the death and violence metaphors that come naturally in the way you speak. What happens when you alter your language? What does it mean to take off the shoes of your voice? We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at [email protected]. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

In these next few sessions, we investigate some orientations and ways of being that are companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised to become stronger and more supple, these qualities might be thought of as fascia, or the tendons — complementary ligaments that make the whole viable and sustainable. The wonderful poet Naomi Shihab Nye is winsome and wise about how writing is a companion to life, and certainly a companion to hope, for her. And it’s a companion to the way we are investigating hope here: the calming simple act of writing things down. Journaling prompts for Session 3 Exchange words with yourself — the many selves alive inside you — about what you’re doing here. What has hope meant in your life and in your world(s)? Do the different selves inside you have different orientations to despair and to imagination with real-world consequences? How about your best self? During this week and in the following weeks, as it feels interesting, try this exercise proposed by Naomi. Land on a single word or phrase that you find animating in this Wisdom Practice, and “use it as as an oar that could get you through the days” — just by holding it in your mind (and heart) and seeing how it rubs against other words and how it meets experiences and other words. And remember Mary Oliver’s advice: Keep your journal close by at all times. We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at [email protected]. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

The great Christian scholar of the biblical prophets died on June 5, 2025. Yet, in the lineage of the prophets who called humanity to face its hardest realities, this profound, warm, and timeless conversation is a stunning offering straight into our present. “The amazing contemporaneity of this material," Walter Brueggemann says to Krista in this conversation from 2011, “and we relive by relistening, is that the issues are the same: the world we have trusted in is vanishing before our eyes and the world that is coming at us feels like a threat to us and we can't quite see the shape of it." He embodied as much as taught a prophetic way of fearless truth telling, fierce hope, and disarming language that can break through "human hearts and human hurt." What is the calling of the Christian in a time like this, and what is the role of the preacher? We are lifting this episode out of the archive to mark this moment. Krista felt particularly called to point to this unedited version of their conversation, which was previously edited to meet time constraints, as the full discussion has such timely resonance. You can also watch the video of this conversation between Krista and Walter Brueggemann on our YouTube page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Find the shorter, edited and produced version of this show — and all of Krista's conversations across the years — on our website at onbeing.org/series/podcast. Bio Walter Brueggemann was the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia. He died on June 5, 2025. He was the author of many books including The Prophetic Imagination, The Spirituality of the Psalms, The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, and, written in his 90s, Real World Faith.

adrienne maree brown shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking. She works with the complex fullness of reality to move towards a wholeness of living. In exploring the idea of hope — the meaning of it, the practice of it — it feels important to begin with someone who works to shift realities on the ground. Many words and phrases have been used to describe what she does and who she is, who she is to so many people, especially in younger generations: She is a student of complexity; a student of change and how groups change together; a scholar of belonging. And she is an organizer as much as a writer. Journaling prompts for Session 2 Preparing inwardly after listening, ask these questions: Examine your orientation to the idea that imagination has real-world consequences. Do you believe that? Trace its reality in the lives of people you admire and in your own life. Ponder emergence. Consider how this way of change has found expression across the years in your life, your work, your world — moments when what you did not plan or control became a catalyst for your growth. “Emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies.” “Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass.” “The crisis we are in at scale is in part a response to control or overcome the emergent processes that are our own nature, the processes of the planet we live on and the universe we call home.” We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at [email protected]. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

Beginning today, and for the next six weeks in the On Being podcast feed and Substack, we’re opening a reflection/course experience curated by Krista and drawing upon her conversations with several visionary humans: adrienne maree brown, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Joy Harjo, Joanna Macy, and Ross Gay. Together, they extend rich and actionable invitations for a muscular, reality-based hope. They offer ways of seeing and living to lay our hands and our hearts, our imaginations and life force on the generative possibilities of life in this time. Journaling Prompts for Session 1 Preparing inwardly after listening, ask these questions: Right now, today, what is filling you with despair? And what is giving you hope? What is hope? Answer this question through the story of your life. Who have been the “live human signposts” of muscular hope in your life across time? Hold their faces and the qualities of their presence in your heart and in your mind’s eye in the days to come. We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even it’s just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at [email protected]. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

Buried treasure from the On Being archive! Krista writes of this conversation from the earliest pre-history of On Being: In the years in which I was on a whole new spiritual and intellectual adventure that changed the direction of my life — years which led to the creation of this show — I befriended a delightful, brilliant, straight-talking theologian named Roberta Bondi. She’s now retired. At that point, she was on the faculty of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. We were placed together as roommates at a five-day consultation. We fell deep into conversation about all kinds of things — life and love and God, a subject that fascinated us both. She’d written a book called Memories of God, and she’d written a series of books about the eccentric, dazzling wisdom of spiritual rebels and innovators known as the desert fathers and mothers of the 3rd century. These were people who believed that the established church — at that time the Church of Rome — had grown cold and remote from very heart of the impulses that brought it into the world in the first place: the rootedness in wisdom and not mere knowledge, the humility over against power, the core moral and spiritual values. Then, not that long ago in our world of institutions ceasing to make sense, someone I very much admire told me he was interested in picking up a practice of prayer. He had no idea how to begin or really even what this would be about – he just knew it was a longing he wanted to follow. The first thing that came to my mind to share with him is this somewhat eccentric, rich little half hour I had with Roberta in the earliest piloting of what eventually became On Being. Her wisdom about what it means to be a person who prays, in conversation and relationship with God, whoever God is and whatever God means, has formed me ever after. I am so delighted to share it now with you. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Bio Roberta Bondi is Professor Emeritus of Church History at Emory University. Her books include To Pray and to Love: Conversations on Prayer with the Early Church; Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life; and In Ordinary Time: Healing the Wounds of the Heart.

This episode emerged from a private gathering in The Hague in the fall of 2024 with a small group of people who live in Israel — both Jewish and Palestinian, Jews and Palestinians who continue to share life. We’re pleased to invite you now to overhear this particular conversation, with the permission of all involved. It centered around the matter of intergenerational trauma and healing — in a land in which the traumas of two peoples are terribly, inextricably intertwined. Yochi Fischer is a historian. Loaay Wattad is a lecturer, translator, and editor focused on children’s and adolescent literature in Arabic and also in Hebrew. It is a gift to experience the friendship between them, as well as the struggle. This, and the passionate interaction with others in the room that follows, holds complexity and nuance and persistent humanity that news from this part of the world rarely conveys. We were brought together by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Looay Wattad is a Palestinian lecturer, researcher, translator, and editor and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is a member of the Maktoob translators’ circle, a group that translates works of literature from Arabic to Hebrew. He is the editor-in-chief of the Hkaya, a web platform centered around children’s literature. Yochi Fischer is a historian and the deputy director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, a senior research fellow at the institute, and head of its Sacredness, Religion, and Secularization Cluster. She also leads its Intellectual Journeys program.Her current research focuses largely on religion and secularization — she also does work on memory and history, and the connection between research and creativity. Special thanks to Michael Feigelson, Shai Held, Rebecca Plumbley, and Philip Pieters of the Toussainthuis. Find aFind an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

A heavy complexity is on the shoulders of the young of our species in these years — humans growing up in this time. At the same time, from the digital revolution and AI to the ecology and society, they have wisdom and instincts in their bones that will be essential if we are all to flourish and not merely survive this century. In November 2024, the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues brought Krista together with esteemed children’s and young adult writer Jason Reynolds and Georgetown student Kessley Janvier. The encounter between the three of them spans generations from the 20s to the 40s to the 60s and extended out to a room of people of all ages and walks of life. The wisdom that unfolded is as much about who we will be and how we will be as what we have before us to do, each in our own lives. Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author of over 20 books for children and young adults. From 2020–2022 he served as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Among many honors, he has received the Newbury, Printz, and Coretta Scott King awards and in 2024 was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is on faculty at Lesley University for the Writing for Young People MFA Program. Kessley Janvier is a senior at Georgetown University, majoring in history. She’s former president of the Georgetown University NAACP. She has organized around reparations, as part of Hoyas Advocating for Slavery Accountability, and she has also led efforts to promote climate justice, police accountability, and racial justice. Special thanks this week to Gillian Huebner, Ian Manzi, Rabbi Rachel Gartner and Derek Goldman. On Being Young in America was sponsored by the Culture of Encounter Project and was convened by the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University in collaboration with The On Being Project. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

A calming and helpful conversation for making sense of the very story of our time, and how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through media and journalism. The theory of change of journalism as it came out of the 20th century, David Bornstein says, is that shining a light on what is going wrong — what is dangerous and dysfunctional, catastrophic or corrupt — will mobilize and lead us to correct it. But this emphasis on the terrible and the extreme, from whichever side of our cultural trenches you inhabit, has helped fuel a paralyzing, dehumanizing fear and the collapse of trust in institutions and in each other. Many of us are turning away from the news altogether. Is that the answer? How to live in this world with this media and retain meaningful, reasonable hope and agency? And what are we not seeing and hearing that we can orient towards? There is no one wiser on these questions than David Bornstein. Krista spoke with David Bornstein before a small group of citizens of Minneapolis in November, 2024. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. BIO David Bornstein is co-founder and CEO of the globally esteemed Solutions Journalism Network. Learn more about their work with news organizations around the world, and their solutions story tracker at solutionsjournalism.org. He has been a journalist focusing primarily on social innovation for three decades. From 2010 to 2021, he co-authored the “Fixes” column in The New York Times. He is the author of The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank and How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, which has been published in 25 languages. Special thanks to Dana Mortenson, who created the event that brought Krista and David together. She is founder of World Savvy, an organization that seeks to reimagine education to build the global competence necessary to navigate a complex and ever-changing world.

Katsi Cook is a beacon in an array of quiet powerful worlds — a magnetic, joyous, loving presence. The public conversation we offer up here was part of a gathering where a fantastic group of young people had come to be nourished, to explore the depths of what community can mean, to become more grounded and whole. They've taken to sitting at the feet of this Mohawk wise woman, mother, and grandmother, and you will experience why. Katsi Cook is globally renowned in the field of midwifery. Her practice and teaching, based in ancient ancestral knowledge, have taken an esteemed place in research and advances in the science of environmental reproductive health. She is founder of the National Aboriginal Council of Midwives of Canada. Her work is at heart, she says, about the "reclamation of the transformative power of birth." And Katsi Cook is helping our world recover the natural human experience of cross-generational companionship and care. This conversation you'll hear between her and Krista, sitting in a room of mostly young people, was an exercise in the art of eldering — which Katsi Cook calls nothing more and nothing less than "generational wealth transmission." Katsi Cook is an Onkwehonweh traditional midwife, elder, and Executive Director of Spirit Aligned Leadership Program. She is a Wolf Clan member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and resides at the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe in upstate New York. Her groundbreaking environmental research of Mohawk mother's milk revealed the intergenerational impact of industrial chemicals on the health and well-being of an entire community. Katsi leads a movement of matrilineal awareness and rematriation in Native life. Her book discussed in this episode is Worlds Within Us: Wisdom and Resilience of Indigenous Women Elders. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page at onbeing.org. There you can find links that will provide context on other people mentioned in the show. Special thanks for the entire experience that brought On Being together with Katsi Cook: Reverend Don Chatfield, Tammy Saltus, and the All Souls Interfaith Gathering congregation; Megan Camp, Tre McCarney, and the team at Shelburne Farms; The Harris and Herzberber Families and High Acres Farms, Philo Ridge Farm, Spirit Aligned Leadership, Gedakina, Guaní Press, and the Akwesasne Freedom School. Jennifer Brandel with Hearken; Mara Zepeda and MCK Keefrider with Linestone, Amelia Rose Barlow, Kristine Hill with Collective Wisdom, and Sara Jolena Wolcott with Sequoia Samanvaya, and audio engineer Abra Clawson. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Wayfarer Foundation; Democracy Fund; and (m)otherboard who supported this Gathering, as well as: Aimee Arandia Østensen, Aly Perry, Amanda Herzberger, Andrew Berns, Ashley Henry, Chief Beverly Cook, Ben Von Wong, Bread and Butter Farm, Carson Linforth Bowley, Casey Ryan, Charlotte Hardie, Christine Lai, Courtney Mulcahy, David Alder, Ethan Bond-Watts, Elizabeth Stewart, Eve Bradford, Grace Oedel, Hanna Satterlee, Heidi Webb, Jeff Herzberger, Jennifer Daniels, Jonathan Harris, John Stokes, Joey Borgogna, Josie Watson, José Barreiro, Judy Dow, Katherine Elmer, Kathy Treat, Ken Miles, Liana Gillooly, Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook, Lynn van Housen, Mario Picayo, Michelle Dai Zotti, Paul & Eileen Growald, Raquel Picayo, Rob Anderson, Speranza Foundation, Tom Cook, Tom Porter, Scott Thrift, Sherry Oakes-Jackson, Ssong Yang, Sue Dixon, Sydney Bolger, Vera Simon-Nobes, Waylon Cook, Wendy Bratt. ______ Sign up for The Pause, a monthly Saturday morning companion for all things On Being, with a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, event invitations, recommendations, and reflections from Krista all year round.

A sweet and searching conversation between Krista and the man behind Bon Iver at this year's On Air Fest, full of wisdom and revelation. He is a person who experiences deeply, who metabolizes creatively, and who just keeps growing. He opens up with Krista about the strangeness of being loved for how he put his broken heart to music. They venture into the mysteries of God and of numbers, the problem of fame, and the deep working of time in a life. He's now released a gorgeous fifth album, SABLE/fABLE. This one tells of immense healing and learning. Justin Vernon is a singer, songwriter and producer and founder and frontman of the band — sometimes called an art project — known as Bon Iver. He lives and makes music in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He has been on a personal and professional adventure since releasing his first album in 2007, For Emma, Forever Ago. His new album SABLE/fABLE is his fifth. He's received multiple Grammys and collaborated with many other artists from Taylor Swift to the Blind Boys of Alabama to Travis Scott and Kanye West. This was recorded live at the 2025 On Air Fest in Brooklyn, New York. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page at onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list re all things On Being — and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

On Being is back on April 16, with a special season tethered in the persistent beauty and courage of what it can mean to be human — six conversations Krista has had out in the world in recent months, followed by an experimental, seven-week reflection/action experience— Hope, Imagination, and Remaking the World — to undertake with others in your life. From singer-songwriter Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) to Mohawk elder Katsi Cook to writer Jason Reynolds. Illuminating our lives of love and our lives with the news and our lives of prayer. Befriending across generations and taking in the trauma of the other. All together, an offering towards the questions we're living on every place on the spectrum of our life together: How do we stand with calm and agency and accompaniment before the gravity of this time. How do we keep body and soul together as we do so? Sign yourself and others up for our mailing list and monthly newsletter, The Pause, to be the first to know when each new episode drops. ______ The Pause — a monthly Saturday morning companion to all things On Being, with heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, event invitations, recommendations, and reflections from Krista all year round.

The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. Her words and her spirit feel, if anything, more necessary now. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She became a professor at Virginia Tech, where she called forth beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there — a precursor to violence that has become all too familiar in American life in the intervening years. And she was an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to all — at home in her body and in the world, even while she saw and exulted in the beyond of this tumultuous age of her lifetime. Nikki Giovanni was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Some of her best known collections from which the readings in this show were taken include Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Her final publications include Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose and A Library. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

She is known as the voice of a generation. The Queen of Folk. A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington. As much as anyone, Joan Baez embodied the spirit of that decade of soaring dreams and songs and dramas set in motion that echo through this world of ours. Meanwhile, her love affair with a young Minnesota singer-songwriter calling himself Bob Dylan, whose career she pivotally helped launch, is also reentering the public imagination with a big new movie. And her classic heartbreak hit about him, “Diamonds and Rust,” is topping global charts anew. But Joan Baez at 83 is so much more intriguing than her projection as a legend. She grew up the daughter of a Mexican physicist father and a Scottish mother in a seemingly idyllic family. But even at the height of her fame, she was struggling mightily with mysterious interior demons. She and her beloved sisters finally reckoned in midlife with a truth of abuse they had buried, even in memory, at great cost. She has reckoned with fracture inside herself and been on an odyssey of wholeness. She is frank and funny, irreverent and wise. Among other gifts, she offers a refreshing way in to what it means to sing and live the reality of “overcoming,” personal and civilizational. Krista spoke with Joan on stage at the 2024 Chicago Humanities Festival. Joan Baez published her first (wonderful) book of poetry at the age of 83: When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance. She was one of the leading artists of the 1960s folk revival, and brought her voice to the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of that decade. She performed for over 60 years, releasing more than 30 albums. She has won scores of awards and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. In addition to her poetry, she has published a book of drawings, Am I Pretty When I Fly?: An Album of Upside Down Drawings, and painted a series of portraits called Mischief Makers. You can find the links for her books here. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. ______ Sign up for The Pause — a monthly Saturday morning companion to all things On Being, with heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, event invitations, recommendations, and reflections from Krista all year round.

The wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of "pleasure activism" and "emergent strategy," is surely one of these. We're listening with new ears as she brings together so many of the threads that have recurred in this season of On Being: on looking the harsh complexity of this world full in the face while dancing with joy as life force and fuel, and on keeping clear eyes on the reasons for ecological despair while giving oneself over to a loving apprenticeship with the natural world as teacher and guide. A love of visionary science fiction also finds a robust place in her work and this conversation. She altogether shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking — the cultivation of old and new ways of seeing, towards a transformative wholeness of living. adrienne maree brown’s influential books include Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us, and Pleasure Activism. More recently, she has published Maroons, a work of speculative fiction, and she co-edited the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She also co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World. And, a special heads up: in late summer 2024, adrienne maree brown will publish a phenomenal new book — Loving Corrections. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. ______ Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

An impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's reading of her piece, “The End of Poetry” — and hear her read more of her work in the On Being episode, “To Be Made Whole.” Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent volume is The Hurting Kind. As poet laureate, she edited the collection You Are Here, part of her signature project focusing on how poetry can connect us to the natural world. She is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and an instructor in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.

We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure — where care stops with a terminal diagnosis. Hospice has moved, from something rare to something expected. And yet advances in technology have made it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expense of the quality of this last time of life. Meanwhile, there is a new longevity industry which resists the very notion of decline, much less finitude. Fascinatingly, the simple question which transformed the surgeon Atul Gawande’s life and practice of medicine is this: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive. This conversation evokes both grief and hope, sadness at so many deaths — including our species-level losses to Covid — that have not allowed for this measure of care. Yet it also includes very actionable encouragement towards the agency that is there to claim in our mortal odysseys ahead. Atul Gawande's writing for The New Yorker and his books have been read by millions, most famously Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He currently serves as Assistant Administrator for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He previously practiced general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and was a professor at both Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This show originally aired in October 2017. ______ Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

Today, a poem with a poignant question to live: “...and are we not of interest to each other?” Carry Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of her poem “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” with you — and hear Elizabeth read more of her poetry in the On Being episode, “Words That Shimmer.” Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, author, and educator. Since 2018, she has served as president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. Her books include American Sublime, a 2006 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the memoir, The Light of the World, a 2016 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Her most recent book is The Trayvon Generation.

We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, and refreshing companion into the deep meaning and the problem of borders — what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us. The Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could be when he was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. In his writing and in this conversation, he complicates every dehumanizing stereotype of Mexicans, "migrants" — and border guards. A deep truth of our time, Luis insists, is that “we miss each other.” He offers a vision of the larger possibility of our time beyond the terrible tangles of today: that we might evolve the old illusion of the melting pot into a 21st-century richness of “us." And he delightfully models that messiness and humor will be required. Luis Alberto Urrea is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois Chicago. His books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction include Into the Beautiful North, The Devil’s Highway, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and Goodnight, Irene. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This show originally aired in July 2018. ______ Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

In our world of so much suffering, it can feel hard or wrong to invoke the word "joy." Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying cries in almost every life-giving conversation that Krista has had across recent months and years, even and especially with people on the front lines of humanity's struggles. Ross Gay helps illuminate this paradox and turn it into a muscle. We are good at fighting, as he puts it, and not as good at holding in our imaginations what is to be adored and preserved and exalted — advocating for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. But without this, he says, we cannot speak meaningfully even about our longings for a more just world, a more whole existence for all. To understand that we are all suffering — and so to practice tenderness and mercy — is a quality of what Ross calls “adult joy." Starting with his cherished essay collection The Book of Delights, he began to accompany many in an everyday spiritual discipline of practicing delight and cultivating joy. Ross Gay is a poet, essayist, teacher, and passionate community gardener. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he’s a professor of English at Indiana University. His books include The Book of Delights, The Book of (More) Delights, and Inciting Joy, as well as the poetry collections Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Be Holding. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This show originally aired in July 2019. ______ Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.