The On Being Project

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.” ⁠
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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.⁠
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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.

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.⁠
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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 (, ). ⁠
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17/05/2024

In this concluding episode of “Poems as Teachers,” our special miniseries on conflict and the human condition, host Pádraig Ó Tuama says the poems discussed in this offering are a different kind of teacher: “not as teachers that give us rules to follow — more so teachers that share something of their own intuition.” And for a final reflection, he offers Kai Cheng Thom’s “trauma is not sacred,” which speaks directly, fiercely, and lovingly to the pain, scars, and violence that we humans carry and inflict upon one another. Listen now.

Pádraig Ó Tuama speaks about how poets and poems can be our teachers and offers Kai Cheng Thom’s “trauma is not sacred” for reflection.

17/05/2024

Being right may feel good, but what human price do we pay for this feeling of rightness? Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The Place Where We Are Right,” translated by Stephen Mitchell, asks us to answer this question, consider how doubt and love might expand and enrich our perspective, and reflect upon the buried and not-so-buried ruins of past conflicts, arguments, and wounds that still call for our attention. Listen to the latest from Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama.

Being right feels good, but what price do we pay for this feeling? Yehuda Amichai’s “The Place Where We Are Right” asks us to consider this question.

16/05/2024

In “Hebrews 13” by Jericho Brown, a narrator says: “my lover and my brother both knocked at my door.” The heat is turned on, scalding coffee is offered and hastily swallowed, and silence is the soundtrack. What an exquisitely awkward triangle it is, and what a human, beautiful, and loving shape that can be. Listen to the latest from Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama.

In “Hebrews 13” by Jericho Brown, “my lover and my brother both knocked" at the narrator's door, and what an exquisitely awkward triangle it is.

16/05/2024

Colette Pichon Battle shares with us her singular model of brilliance and graciousness of mind and spirit and action. To be with her in this conversation is to open to the way the stories we tell have blunted us to the courage we’re called to, and the joy we must nurture, as life force and fuel for the work ahead. She is a vivid embodiment of the new forms societal shift is taking in our world — led by visionary pragmatists close to the ground, in particular places, persistently and lovingly learning and leading the way for us all. Listen now.

Colette Pichon Battle is co-founder and Vision & Initiatives Partner for Taproot Earth, a global organization, which has emerged from the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy that she founded and led in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She and her colleagues are influencing manifold aspects of our ecological present, including equitable disaster recovery and global migration, community economic development and energy democracy. Learn more at taproot.earth.

The stories we must tell as the places we come from transform around us. The courage we're called to. And love as life force and fuel.

15/05/2024

In Mosab Abu Toha's “Ibrahim Abu Lughod and brother in Yaffa,” two barefoot siblings on a beach sketch out a map of their former home in the sand and argue about what went where. Their longing for return to a place of hospitality, family, memory, friends, and even strangers is alive and tender to the touch. Listen to the latest from Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama.

In Mosab Abu Toha’s “Ibrahim Abu Lughod and brother in Yaffa,” two siblings on a beach draw their former home and yearn for a space of their own.

14/05/2024

We ask questions to find out the facts, but what if you can’t trust the answers, the questions, or the person who’s asking the questions? In Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” translated by Evan Jones, leaders exercise a sinister kind of violence — they’ve taken over people’s imaginations with showy displays of wealth and privilege, time-wasting ceremony, and fear coursing beneath it all. Listen Now.

In Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” translated by Evan Jones, leaders are using a sinister violence — they've seized imaginations.

14/05/2024

In this Poetry Unbound episode, host ushers you into the tense, timely classic “Waiting for the Barbarians” by Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Evan Jones. In this poem, we are all onlookers to a theater of deception put on by those in power, leading us to ask how much we’re willing to put up with and what we’re prepared to do to change the system. ⁠
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“The Barbarians Arrive Today” is from the book The Barbarians Arrive Today: Poems and Prose. Thanks to publisher for permission to share Constantine’s work. ⁠
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🎧Listen via the link in our bio, on your preferred podcast platform.⁠
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13/05/2024

As appealing as it may sound, is it really possible to live in a world completely free of conflict? No. And since differences and disagreements are inevitable and natural, Joy Harjo gives ground rules in “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.” Her call to us echoes across time and space — a call to listen, to humility, to justice, and to recognizing the land, the living, the dead, the not-yet-living. Listen now.

In the poem “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings,” Joy Harjo gives us ground rules to help us navigate our inevitable differences and disagreements.

12/05/2024

In a world filled with divisions, disagreements, and black-and-white thinking, what can we turn to in order to stay open, aware, and grounded? Poetry, believe it or not.

This week, the Poetry Unbound podcast is offering a mini-season of 7 episodes — in each 15-minute listen, host shares a work from a different poet that has something to say about conflict. In the 1st episode, he gives a quick season overview, along with a look at Wisława Szymborska’s wry, relatable poem “A Word on Statistics,” translated by Joanna Trzeciak.

“A Word on Statistics” is from the book Miracle Fair. Thanks to publisher .w.norton for permission to share Wislawa’s work.

Listen for yourself, wherever you stream podcasts.

09/05/2024

In her writing, it is Kate DiCamillo's gift to make bearable the fact that joy and sorrow live so close, side by side, in life as it is (if not as we wish it to be). In this conversation, along with good measures of raucous laughter and a few tears, Kate summons us to hearts "capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries of ourselves and each other" — qualities these years in the life of the world call forth from all of us, young and old, with ever greater poignancy and vigor. Listen now.

On bearing heartbreak and hope side by side in this life. A conversation for being real with the young — and for the eight-year-old in you.

02/05/2024

A special two-month season of On Being starts May 9. Freshly curated conversations from across the On Being archive. Big new conversations and extra offerings. Join us.

Nine conversations, new and from the On Being archive, for a tumultuous year in the life of the world. How to stay grounded — and keep courage, hope, and imagination alive.

25/04/2024

Krista Tippett in the world! Art meets science in this conversation with artist Enrique Martínez Celaya and chemist Roald Hoffmann, delving into creativity, ethics, and the dialogue between these vital disciplines. Many thanks to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for hosting.

Sunday, April 21, 20242–3 pmRoald Hoffmann, chemist and writerEnrique Martínez Celaya, artistModerated by Krista Tippett, journalist and authorHear from reno...

18/04/2024

Art meets science! Krista Tippett will be in conversation with artist Enrique Martínez Celaya and chemist Roald Hoffmann, delving into creativity, ethics, and the dialogue between these vital disciplines.

Details Roald Hoffmann, chemist and writer Enrique Martínez Celaya, artist Moderated by Krista Tippett, journalist and author Hear from renowned artist and former physicist Enrique Martínez Celaya and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann as they come together for a conversation exploring the...

26/02/2024

Do you like poetry … but wished you could love it just a little bit more? Listen to the Poetry Unbound podcast — in each short (only 15 minutes!) and satisfying episode, host introduces you to a single poem by a different poet. And: all 16 episodes of season 8 are available to enjoy right now.

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23/02/2024

If your home were a museum — and they all are, in a way — what would the contents of your refrigerator say about you and those you live with? In his poem “Refrigerator, 1957,” Thomas Lux opens the door to his childhood appliance and oh, does a three-quarters full jar of maraschino cherries speak volumes. Listen now.

In his poem “Refrigerator, 1957,” Thomas Lux opens the door to his childhood appliance, where a jar of maraschino cherries speaks volumes.

21/02/2024

The word “flush” is a verb, as in an activity that we do umpteen times a day. It’s also an adjective that conveys abundance. Fittingly, Rita Wong’s poem “flush” offers a praise song to water’s expansive and unceasing presence in our lives — from our toilets to our teacups, from inside our bodies to outside our buildings, and from our soil to our skies. Listen now.

Rita Wong’s poem “flush” proffers a praise song to water’s expansive and unceasing presence in our lives.

17/02/2024

Bro! Maria Dahvana Headley's canny, contemporary take on “Beowulf” is not the one that you read in school — yet it’s still a line-by-line translation that infuses this Old English epic with guts, swagger, and relevance. Listen to this episode of Poetry Unbound as host Pádraig Ó Tuama talks you through its first 25 lines.

This excerpt Is from the book Beowulf: A New Translation. Thanks to publisher MCD x FSG for the permission to share Maria’s work.

16/02/2024

Bro — this is definitely not the “Beowulf” that you read back in school. Maria Dahvana Headley’s gutsy, swaggering translation brings the Old English epic poem roaring into this century, showing you why this tale of fraught family ties, power plays and posturing, and mighty, imperfect people is as relevant as ever. Listen Now

Maria Dahvana Headley’s gutsy, swaggering translation of “Beowulf” brings the Old English epic poem roaring and storming into this century.

12/02/2024

A horse race from the 1980s may not seem like the obvious inspiration for a poem that celebrates so many of the things that make our lives worth living — good company (human and animal), good books, good food, and honest work — and that is just part of the surprise, delight, and surging joy of Michael Klein’s “Swale.” Listen now.

Michael Klein's "Swale" celebrates the things that make our lives worth living: good company (human and animal), good books, good food, honest work.