Wisdom to replenish & orient. Conversations to live by with 20 years of beloved, revelatory shows.
16/12/2024
In this Poetry Unbound episode, host presents ’s delightfully visual “Trespassing with Tweens”, in which a human mother and her kids stand and watch in awe as a Great Blue Heron flaps in and feeds its two young. The pleasures in this poem are profound and multiple – the joys in seeing, in sharing the experience of seeing, in seeing with fresh eyes, and in being seen.
“Trespassing with Tweens” is from the book Boxed Juice. Thanks to publisher Unbound Edition Press () for permission to share Danielle’s work.
Listen for yourself, wherever you stream podcasts.
13/12/2024
How do the words in this quote affect you? Do they call you to think, act, or something else? In this Poetry Unbound episode, host shares Richard Langston’s “Hill walk” — a crisp, gentle poem that hints at the mystery to be found in the range of things that possess the power to move us.
“Hill walk” is from the book Five O’Clock Shadows. Thanks to publisher for permission to share Richard’s work.
Listen for yourself, wherever you stream podcasts.
13/12/2024
Rest in peace, Nikki Giovanni. Krista’s conversation with her, updated in 2021, is a feast of her wisdom and joy, which we need now as much as ever before …
Their conversation is available for you to hear, wherever you listen to podcasts.
What sacrifices were made by your parents when you were a child? How did you think about these acts as they were happening? And how do you think about them now? In this Poetry Unbound episode, host offers the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, which holds space for a weighted childhood memory and all the regret, love, and anger it evokes.
“Those Winter Sundays” is from the book Collected Poems: Robert Hayden. Thanks to publishers and .w.norton for permission to share Robert’s work.
Listen for yourself, wherever you stream podcasts.
06/12/2024
When you look at people who are younger than you — particularly teenagers — does your mind ever take you back to yourself at their age? In this Poetry Unbound episode, host brings us into a tender, revelatory poem that performs just such a feat of time travel. “Pennsylvania ave. SE” by Taylor Johnson () jumps from a glimpse of two boys to a haunting sense memory of what was once so yearned for: to be seen, to be wanted, to be free.
“Pennsylvania ave. SE” is from the book Inheritance. Thanks to publishers and for permission to share Taylor’s work.
Listen for yourself, wherever you stream podcasts.
02/12/2024
This new season of Poetry Unbound roars to a start with host introducing us to “Put on that KTNN”, a marvelous, multisensory poem by Kinsale Drake (). In it, she creates her own kind of country music — of Navajo voices next to Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, of drumbeats and guitar licks, of things made by nature and things made by humans, all rooted in the desert sand.
“Put on that KTNN” is from the book The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket. Thanks to publisher University of Georgia Press () for permission to share Kinsale’s work.
Listen for yourself, wherever you stream podcasts.
26/11/2024
Joan Baez 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. But Joan Baez at 83 is so much more intriguing than her projection as a legend.
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. Their conversation is now available for you to hear, wherever you listen to podcasts.
25/11/2024
Filled with strong emotions and not sure what to do about them?
We’ve got the podcast for you. Hosted by , season 9 of Poetry Unbound has 14 snackable, satisfying episodes exploring 14 poems full of the feelings that come with being human — like rage, regret, confusion, lust, love, and more. Take a listen, and let poetry help express and give shape to what’s bubbling inside of you.
09/07/2024
We live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told that it is scarce and we are given all these stories of scarcity … what does it look like to imagine beyond the constructs? What does it look like to imagine a future where we all get to be there not causing harm to each other and experiencing abundance?”
These are the words of adrienne maree brown (), a self-proclaimed student of complexity and scholar of magic. We are delighted to re-release our newly edited 2022 On Being episode with adrienne — where she and Krista discuss the depths of existence, working with the complex fullness of reality, and cultivating old and new ways of seeing to move towards a transformative wholeness of living.
To find out what inspires her, please leave your interesting, fun, or thoughtful questions below, and adrienne might just answer them as she prepares for the launch of her new book, Loving Corrections, on August 20 from AK Press ().
03/07/2024
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. 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.
The social creative and visionary of emergence. Fractals. Pleasure activism. How we change — and change together.
27/06/2024
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.
What does a good day look like? A new conversation about what dying has to do with living.
20/06/2024
We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, writer Luis Alberto Urrea says in this week’s On Being episode, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, 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 Luis was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. Today, as part of his work as an author and educator, he regularly speaks to migrant children. He says, “I deal with so many kids who can’t tell their story, and they don’t think anybody loves them. They think nobody cares. They think everybody hates them. They’re waiting to be thrown out of the country or their mothers to vanish. So part of it is talking to people who need to say it more. Part of it is talking to myself, to say, “Don’t be a coward. Tell people you love them.” And part of it is, I’m often talking to 600 kids, not you adults, and I tell them, “I love you. I love you all,” because somebody’s got to. You’ve got to — if I could have a radio show, I would just read them a story every night and tell them I love them.”
Listen to his conversation with Krista now, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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.
20/06/2024
We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, writer Luis Alberto Urrea says in this week’s On Being episode, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, 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 Luis was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. Today, as part of his work as an author and educator, he regularly speaks to migrant children. He says, “I deal with so many kids who can’t tell their story, and they don’t think anybody loves them. They think nobody cares. They think everybody hates them. They’re waiting to be thrown out of the country or their mothers to vanish. So part of it is talking to people who need to say it more. Part of it is talking to myself, to say, “Don’t be a coward. Tell people you love them.” And part of it is, I’m often talking to 600 kids, not you adults, and I tell them, “I love you. I love you all,” because somebody’s got to. You’ve got to — if I could have a radio show, I would just read them a story every night and tell them I love them."
Listen to his conversation with Krista now, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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.
The exuberant and wise writer on the deep meaning of borders —and the deep truth of our time that "we miss each other."
13/06/2024
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. Listen now.
The writer and gardener on noticing delight, practicing tenderness, and joy as a calling — even and especially in our world of pain.
06/06/2024
In this all-new episode, Krista engages biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus (Co-Founder Biomimicry Institute & Biomimicry 3.8)in a second, urgent conversation, alongside creative biomimicry practitioner Azita Ardakani Walton. Together they trace precise guidance and applied wisdom from the natural world for the civilizational callings before us now.
What does nature have to teach us about healing from trauma? And how might those of us aspiring to good and generative lives start to function like an ecosystem rather than a collection of separate, siloed projects? We are in kinship. How to make that real — and in making it real, make it more of an offering to the whole wide world?
Krista, Azita, and Janine spoke at the January 2024 gathering of visionaries, activists, and creatives where Krista also drew out Lyndsey Stonebridge and Lucas Johnson for the recent episode on Hannah Arendt. We’re excited to bring you back into that room. Listen now.
What does the natural world have to teach us about healing from trauma, and grieving well, and acting like the ecosystem the world needs us to be?
30/05/2024
The years of pandemic and lockdown are still working powerfully on us from the inside. But we have trouble acknowledging this, much less metabolizing it. This conversation with Christine Runyan (Tend Health) , which took place in the dark middle of those years, helps make sense of our present of still-unfolding epidemic distress — as individuals, as communities, as a species. She has cultivated a reverence for the human nervous system. She tells truths about our bodies that western medicine itself is only fitfully learning to see. This quiet conversation is not just revelatory, but healing and calming. It holds startling prescience about some of what we’re navigating now. And it offers self-compassion and simple strategies for finding ease within ourselves — and with each other — as we live forward from here. Listen now.
Prescience, understanding, and simple strategies for metabolizing what the past four years have worked inside us — as individuals, and as a species.
24/05/2024
It’s so rare that we get a chance to capture lightning in a bottle, but that’s what happened when we recorded former On Being guest J. Drew Lanham at a live event in January: in a heart-stirring performance, he adapted the title poem of his wonderful new collection, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves (Hub City Writers Project). Enjoy it, and be sure also to listen to “Pathfinding Through the Improbable,” his full 2022 conversation — complete with poetry and birdsong — with Krista.
J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature and the collection of poetry and meditations, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts.
[Editor’s Note: This reflects a live performance of the poem and differs from the published piece.] Joy is the justice we give ourselves. It is Maya’s bird sung free past the prison bars, holding spirits bound— without due process, without just cause. Joy is the steady running stream, rights s...
23/05/2024
“Loneliness is the bully that coerces us into giving up on democracy.”
That stunning sentence was written by Lyndsey Stonebridge, our guest this week, channeling the 20th-century political thinker and journalist Hannah Arendt. Krista interviewed Lyndsey in 2017, after Arendt’s classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, became a belated bestseller; now Lyndsey has published a wonderful, elevating, helpful book offering her and Arendt’s prescient wisdom for this time. We have, in Lyndsey’s phrase, “un-homed” ourselves, and yet we are always defined by our capacity to give birth to something new — and so to partake again and again in the deepest meaning of freedom.
Lyndsey Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., and her new book is We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (Penguin Random House, , )
Lyndsey Stonebrige on Hannah Arendt and wisdom that ripples forward in time — on the fragile human underlay of democracy. The difference between violence and power. The promise of natality.
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Videos
Season 8 of Poetry Unbound may be officially over, but don’t worry: your hunger for poetry will not be unsatisfied. Host @padraigotuama plans to share extras — interviews, snippets, reflections — in the run-up to a new season which will drop later this year. You can also listen to our archive of 150+ past episodes, and subscribe to the Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter.
#poetry #poems #poetrycommunity #contemplation #podcast #meditation #writing
Language lovers: Poetry 101 is in session. ✏️
Here, host @padraigotuama explains how poets today are going beyond forms like sonnets and villanelles to showcase their work in recipes, signs, Q&As, and more.
This Poetry Unbound episode focuses on the poem “Deer Dance Exhibition,” which is from the book Ocean Power by Ofelia Zepeda. Thanks to publisher @azpress for permission to share Ofelia’s work.
🎧Listen on your preferred podcast platform.
#poetry #poems #poetrycommunity #contemplation #podcast #meditation #writing
We have a prediction for you for 2024: There'll be some days of demand. Yes, really. 😉
In episode 1 of the Poetry Unbound podcast, host Pádraig Ó Tuama brings us into the smart, tart poem, “How the Dung Beetle Finds Its Way Home,” and in it, artist Eugenia Leigh shows how she’s dealt with her own demanding moments.
Thanks to Four Way Books for permission to share Eugenia’s work.
🎧Listen via your preferred podcast platform.
#poetry #poems #poetrycommunity #contemplation #podcast #meditation #writing
Do you love poetry? Or do you just want to learn to love poetry?
Then listen to our new season of Poetry Unbound — the first episode drops January 1.
8 weeks. 16 episodes. 15 minutes each.
In every episode, host @padraigotuama explores a single delicious poem from a brilliant artist.
🎧Listen on your preferred podcast platform.
#poetry #poems #poetrycommunity #contemplation #podcast #meditation #writing
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Our Story
The On Being show and podcast was created by Krista Tippett inside a legacy media organization (American Public Media) in 2003.
It began with a controversial idea for a public radio conversation, Speaking of Faith, that would treat the religious and spiritual aspects of life as seriously as we treat politics and economics. On Being, as it has evolved, takes up the great questions of meaning in 21st-century lives and at the intersection of spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and the arts. What does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?
The show launched on two public radio stations. Even as it grew year over year, it remained fairly hidden on the dial, consigned, as the New York Times wrote, to the “God ghetto” timeslot of Sunday mornings. When podcasting came along, On Being took its place among leading podcasts. It has been downloaded and played over 200 million times.
People tell us every day that they have “discovered” On Being, and not by buzz, but by passage from one human being to another — sometimes as a lifeline, often across generations. The impact of this content has always felt less like that of an interview show and more like that of a social enterprise (with a radio show at its heart).
A few years in, audience research began to document what we had been anecdotally tracing and have continued to see: Our media space gathers people together across boundaries of age, race, geography, politics, and religion — at the same time that these boundaries have been calcifying in the culture at large.
We’ve come to understand our work as a “media and public life initiative.” The Civil Conversations Project (CCP) was the first expression of this, beginning in 2011. It has become an ongoing, ever-evolving offering of conversations and public events that is woven throughout our core body of work.
In 2013, Krista and a team of three producers (Trent Gilliss, Chris Heagle, and Liliana Maria Percy Ruíz) took On Being and CCP into organizational and production independence.
In the past few years, we developed the cultural momentum and organizational infrastructure to begin to scale to the next level. Scaling, for us, is about going deeper and not just bigger.
Our team has grown to represent a beautiful cross-section of talent and human identity. Liliana Maria Percy Ruiz leads On Being Studios. Lucas Johnson is building out our next stage social healing capacities. As head of Community and Design, Serri Graslie is innovating a mission-centric design approach in all the places we communicate to our audiences and the world.
A cross-organizational creative team drove a massive re-envisioning of this site, onbeing.org, that we launched in early 2019. This “Future Project,” as we called it, turned our 15-year archive into a hospitable, living resource — part gathering space, part anti-bubble. It is a template and foundation for content, digital innovation and community-building to come.
We believe that collaborative discovery will be a key to living into the generative possibilities of this moment — not just in the halls of the academy or scientific laboratories, but in the everyday living laboratories of our communities, our friendships, and our minds.
