On Being with Krista Tippett

Pádraig makes an announcement, and we listen to a few lovely moments from the On Being season we've just brought into the world. We're inviting the beautiful humans who gather around On Being to partner in the vitality of the unfolding On Being Project in a new way. Our friend Maria Popova says it daringly, beautifully, and she's given us permission to adapt her equation. Giving = loving. Any amount of love and sustenance will be gratefully — indeed, gleefully — received.Learn more and make a gift: onbeing.org/LoveUs.

We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we've been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He's a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Surgeon General. And for years, he's been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition. It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity — and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn.There are many resources for mental health support. If you're in the U.S., find some of them here.Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he's the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Please share On Being with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues, and perfect strangers in the checkout line at the grocery store. And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.

An excerpt from the On Being episode, "To Be a Healer." The extraordinary physician and public servant stilled a raucous room full of storytellers and podcasters with this offering at the 2023 On Air Fest.Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he's the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we've been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He's a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Surgeon General. And for years, he's been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition. It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity — and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn.There are many resources for mental health support. If you're in the U.S., find some of them here.Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he's the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.This unedited audio includes audience Q & A at the 2023 On Air Fest. Find a shorter, produced version in the On Being episode "Vivek Murthy — To Be a Healer." The transcript for that show is at onbeing.org.___________Please share On Being with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues, and perfect strangers in the checkout line at the grocery store. And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.

"I like it much better than ‘religious' or ‘spiritual' — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real."– Rev. Barbara Brown TaylorFrom Krista, about this week's show:It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church — about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she's written, "alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.” She's written other books since, with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor's wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. I might even use a religious word — it feels like a "blessing." And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being "spiritual but not religious." We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time — even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara's Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of many books, including An Altar in the World,  Leaving Church, Holy Envy, and Learning to Walk in the Dark. Her 2020 book is Always a Guest, a compilation of recent sermons. She is the former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church of Clarkesville, Georgia, and she taught for two decades in the religion department at Piedmont College.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Let's get together. We're going to do another listening party — listening, all together and with Krista, to the final episode of this season. Register here.___________Please share On Being with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues, and perfect strangers in the checkout line at the grocery store. And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.

"I like it much better than ‘religious' or ‘spiritual' — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real."– Rev. Barbara Brown TaylorFrom Krista, about this week's show:It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church — about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she's written, "alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.” She's written other books since, with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor's wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. I might even use a religious word — it feels like a "blessing." And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being "spiritual but not religious." We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time — even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara's Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of many books, including An Altar in the World,  Leaving Church, Holy Envy, and Learning to Walk in the Dark. Her 2020 book is Always a Guest, a compilation of recent sermons. She is the former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church of Clarkesville, Georgia, and she taught for two decades in the religion department at Piedmont College.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Barbara Brown Taylor — ‘This Hunger for Holiness'." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.___________Please share On Being with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues, and perfect strangers in the checkout line at the grocery store. And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.

To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. She's a mentor and teacher to a new generation of social activism and creativity. She's a visionary of “abolition,” and that has become a fraught and polarizing word in our fraught and polarized public discourse. But when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of “abolition,” she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world, starting now, in which prisons and policing as we do them now become unnecessary, unthinkable. In this sense, abolition is not primarily a matter of what to get rid of, but what to build and to orient around — being present, for example, to human vulnerability and to the ingredients that make for deep human flourishing. Meeting Ruth Wilson Gilmore and drawing her out in this way is an exercise in muscular hope — and in understanding the passion of a new generation that is shaping what we will collectively become.Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her paternal grandfather was a janitor at Yale who helped organize the first blue-collar union at that university. And as a tool and die maker for the firearm manufacturer Winchester, her father played a central role in organizing the machinists at that company in the mid-1950s. She has co-founded several organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She has authored and co-edited several books, including Golden Gulag, Abolition Geography, and the forthcoming Change Everything. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Please share On Being with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues, and perfect strangers in the checkout line at the grocery store. And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.

There is a quiet, redemptive story of our time in this conversation — a radical way of approaching the gravest of our problems by attending to how original vitality functions. Biomimicry takes the natural world as mentor and teacher — for, as Janine Benyus puts it, "we are surrounded by geniuses." Nature solves problems and performs what appear to us as miracles in every second, all around: running on sunlight, fitting form to function, recycling everything, relentlessly "creating conditions conducive to life.” Janine launched this way of seeing and imagining as a field with her 1997 book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Today she teaches and consults with all kinds of projects and organizations, including major corporations, as you'll hear. Welcome to this unfolding parallel universe in our midst, which might just shift the way you see almost everything about our possible futures.This conversation was part of The Great Northern Festival, a celebration of Minnesota's signature cold, creative winters.Janine Benyus is the author of several books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She is the co-founder of the non-profit Biomimicry Institute and Biomimicry 3.8, a consulting and training company.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Please share On Being with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues, and perfect strangers in the checkout line at the grocery store. And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.

The flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering — and life practices which call that alchemy forth. The mystery of it all that can only be named and wondered at — and the ordinary mystery that creativity is a human birthright, a way of being rather than doing, that beckons to us all, in everything we do, from crafting something to conversing to the arranging of furniture in a room.This is where Krista goes with the rock star music producer Rick Rubin. It's not a conversation about the creative process of the many great musicians he's worked with — but a conversation that is for and about us all. There are some surprises, too, in his lovely, soothing voice — like the way he finds a metaphor for all of life in pro wrestling. And he leaves the doors of his studio wide open as they speak, so there is a soundtrack of ocean waves.Rick Rubin has been a singular, transformative creative muse for artists across genres and generations — from the Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash, from Public Enemy to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, from Adele to Jay-Z. To name just a few. His new (and first) book is The Creative Act: A Way of Being. He is co-founder of the record label Def Jam Recordings, and former co-president of Columbia Records. He is also one of the hosts of the podcast, Broken Record. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Please share this new season of On Being with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues, and perfect strangers… ! And be sure you've followed On Being in the app place of your choice. And if you can take a minute to rate the show, too, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok).

In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson's eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings "caste" into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system — more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, Isabel Wilkerson says race is the skin, but "caste is the bones." And this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why race and racism continue to shape-shift and regenerate, every best intention and effort and law notwithstanding. But beginning to see caste also gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin, and how to persist, in order finally to shift that. Isabel and Krista spoke in Seattle before a packed house at Benaroya Hall, at the invitation of Seattle Arts & Lectures.[Content Advisory: Beginning at 21:16, there is a discussion of Nazi terminology and a quotation from Hitler with an epithet that is offensive and painful. We chose to include this language to illustrate the heinous nature of the history being discussed and Hitler's admiration for it.]Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________We keep hearing that people don't know that this new season of On Being is happening. So please share with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues! And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok).

You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the “broad commonwealth of life” that we are “inextricably entangled with and suffused by”; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot. The technologist/artist James Bridle brings all of this into interplay with an intriguing, refreshing lens on our lives with technology — and with all that artificial intelligence is and might become.You might not think of intelligence the same way again, or the truth of mythology, or the letters of the alphabet, or what it means to be human. And you will smile next time you access the place where your digital life is stored and realize what it says about us that we named it The Cloud.James Bridle is an artist and technologist and author of the books Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence and New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Their writing has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, The Atlantic, and many other places. Their art has been exhibited around the world, including at NOME Gallery in Berlin. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________We keep hearing that people don't know that this new season of On Being is happening. So please share with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues! And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok).

You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the “broad commonwealth of life” that we are “inextricably entangled with and suffused by”; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot. The technologist/artist James Bridle brings all of this into interplay with an intriguing, refreshing lens on our lives with technology — and with all that artificial intelligence is and might become.You might not think of intelligence the same way again, or the truth of mythology, or the letters of the alphabet, or what it means to be human. And you will smile next time you access the place where your digital life is stored and realize what it says about us that we named it The Cloud.James Bridle is an artist and technologist and author of the books Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence and New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Their writing has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, The Atlantic, and many other places. Their art has been exhibited around the world, including at NOME Gallery in Berlin.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "James Bridle — The Intelligence Singing All Around Us." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.___________We keep hearing that people don't know that this new season of On Being is happening. So please share with friends, family, book clubs, neighbors, colleagues! And if you can take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app, you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok).

Nick Offerman has played many great characters, most famously Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, and he starred more recently in an astonishing episode of The Last of Us. But he is driven by passionate callings older and deeper than his public vocation as an actor and comedian. He works with wood, and he works with other people who work with their hands making beautiful, useful things. And this, it turns out, is also a primary source of his tethering in values. It's a source of a spiritual thoughtfulness that runs through this conversation with Krista. So is his love and study of the farmer-poet Wendell Berry, whose audiobook The Need to Be Whole Nick just recorded.This is a moving and edifying conversation that is also, not surprisingly, a lot of fun.Nick Offerman grew up on a three-acre homestead "out in a cornfield" in Minooka, Illinois. His five books include Where the Deer and the Antelope Play and Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop. He founded Offerman Woodshop in Los Angeles in 2001, a collective that creates hand-crafted items from spoons to canoes to ukuleles. He's also written a book with his wife, Megan Mullally, called The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, and they have a podcast called In Bed with Nick and Megan. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Please share On Being lavishly — with friends, family, book clubs, colleagues… and show us some love, if you have a minute, by rating On Being in this app. It's a small way to bend the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok).

An electric conversation with Ada Limón's wisdom and her poetry — a refreshing, full-body experience of how this way with words and sound and silence teaches us about being human at all times, but especially now. With an unexpected and exuberant mix of gravity and laughter — laughter of delight, and of blessed relief — this conversation holds not only what we have traversed these last years, but how we live forward. It unfolded at the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis, in collaboration with Northrop at the University of Minnesota and Ada Limón's publisher, Milkweed Editions.Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She's written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind. Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and she teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________________Please share On Being lavishly — with friends, family, book clubs, colleagues… wherever curiosity, conversation, and joyful shared pondering happens in your world. And show us some love, if you have a minute, by rating On Being in this app. It's a small way to bend the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok).

Ada Limón reads her poem, “The Quiet Machine.” This poem is featured in Ada's On Being conversation with Krista, “To Be Made Whole.” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She's written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind. Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and she teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.

Ada Limón reads her poem, “A New National Anthem.” This poem is featured in Ada's On Being conversation with Krista, “To Be Made Whole.” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She's written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind. Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and she teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina. 

Ada Limón reads her poem, “Dead Stars.” This poem is featured in Ada's On Being conversation with Krista, “To Be Made Whole.” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She's written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind. Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and she teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina. 

Amanda Ripley began her life as a journalist covering crime, disaster, and terrorism. Then in 2018, she published a brilliant essay called “Complicating the Narratives,” which she opened by confessing a professional existential crisis. We journalists, she wrote, “can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we've reached our collective limitations … Again and again, we have escalated the conflict and snuffed the complexity out of the conversation."Yet what Amanda has gone on to investigate — and so, so helpfully illuminate — is not just about journalism, or about politics. It touches almost every aspect of human life in almost every society around the world right now. We think we're divided by issues, arguing about conflicting facts. But at a deeper level, she says, we are trapped in a pattern of distress known as “high conflict” — where the conflict itself has become the point, and it sweeps everything into its vortex. So how to get out? What Amanda has been gathering by way of answers to that question is an extraordinary gift to us all.Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist who sometimes describes herself as a "recovering journalist" — and a trained conflict mediator. She's written several acclaimed books, including High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. You can find her essay “Complicating the Narratives” on the Solutions Journalism blog. She is the co-founder of the company Good Conflict and hosts the Slate podcast How To!. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Please share On Being lavishly — with friends, family, book clubs, colleagues… wherever curiosity, conversation, and joyful shared pondering happens in your world. And show us some love, if you have a minute, by rating On Being in this app. It's a small way to bend the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Also: sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being — at onbeing.org/newsletter. And delve more across our social channels: (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok).

One of the most fascinating developments of our time is that human qualities we have understood in terms of virtue — experiences we've called spiritual — are now being taken seriously by science as intelligence — as elements of human wholeness. Dacher Keltner and his Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley have been pivotal in this emergence. From the earliest years of his career, he investigated how emotions are coded in the muscles of our faces, and how they serve as “moral sensory systems." He was called on as Emojis evolved; he consulted on Pete Docter's groundbreaking movie Inside Out. All of this, as Dacher sees it now, led him deeper and deeper into investigating the primary experience of awe in human life — moments when we have a sense of wonder, an experience of mystery, that transcends our understanding. These, it turns out, are as common in human life globally as they are measurably health-giving and immunity-boosting. They bring us together with others, again and again. They bring our nervous system and heartbeat and breath into sync — and even into sync with other bodies around us.Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the Greater Good Science Center. He hosts the podcast The Science of Happiness. His latest book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.______________If you enjoy this conversation, please share it with a friend, colleague, family ... or book club! And show us some love, if you have a minute, by rating On Being in this app. It's a small way to bend the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living.Sign up for our Saturday morning ritual of a newsletter, The Pause, for replenishment and invigoration in your inbox — and of course all things On Being, at onbeing.org/newsletter. And travel across our social channels (Instagram, Youtube, and TikTok) to delve deeper into ideas from the show.

We are immensely grateful for your patience in our season of podcasting pause. But enough already. Starting Thursday, February 2, we'll come to you with three months of soaring new On Being conversations with Krista, with an eye towards emergence. The science of awe. The wonder of biomimicry. "Lean Spirituality." What we're talking about — and not — when we talk about mental health. "Good conflict." Technology and vitality. Creativity. Woodworking and the meaning of life. Deeper truths and larger stories of ourselves as societies, as a planet, as humans, that at once complicate and enliven our capacity to live with dignity and joy and wholeness. And poetry, and poetry.As we live into, yes, this new way of being — with podcasting and not radio, our first audio home — we're eager to extend an invitation to listen as widely as possible. Please spread the word in your world and your digital places. And show us some love, if you have a minute, by rating On Being in this app. It's a small way to bend the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living. We are so thrilled to have you as part of this, and to be back. Sign up for our Saturday newsletter, The Pause, for extras every week and news on all that is happening at the wider On Being Project, at onbeing.org/newsletter.

"It is still an enduringly strange and hard time to be alive. And December is always hard for many of us — filled with all kinds of experiences and feelings that contradict each other or contradict how we think we are supposed to be feeling … Yet it's also on my mind, as we roll around to nearly three years since the pandemic shifted the ground beneath our feet, that we are a bit more open, many of us, to pick up more of what these years have given us to see and to learn and to live into."Register here for Antigone in Savannah — December 21, 5:15pm - 8:00pm ET.Experience catharsis — a release of insight and emotions that have had no place to go, with an energizing relief, in which Bryan Doerries' Theater of War is so gifted. A collaboration between Theater of War Productions, the Center for Jubilee, Reconciliation & Healing, and On Being, featuring Jesse Eisenberg, Ato Blankson-Wood, Marjolaine Goldsmith — and Krista Tippett."Remember, you are not alone in this room, and you are not alone across time." – Bryan Doerries

The language of vocation comes from the Latin “vocari”: “calling.” It is a word we use often at On Being as a pointer for the way forward. In Western culture, vocation has long been equated with work and with job title. But each of us is called not merely to be a professional, but to be a friend, neighbor, colleague, family, citizen, lover of the world. We are called to creativity and caring and play and service for which we will never be paid — or never be paid enough — but which will make life worth living. And each of us imprints the people in the world around us, breath to breath and hour to hour, as much in who we are and how we are present as in whatever we do. Just as there are callings for a life, there are callings for our time. Every surface of fracture in our world notwithstanding, for us all of life is being revealed in its insistence on wholeness: the organic interplay between our bodies, the natural world, the lives we make, the worlds we create. It is the calling of callings to make that vivid and practical and real, starting inside ourselves and with the lives we've been given.______________Consider picking up a journal, or something to record with, when you sit down or step out to listen to this episode. Take it, and the prompts below, as a companion in listening and your life beyond listening. Also: you might invite someone(s) to join you.Ponder:Begin to make a list, to muse and write about what in your life is in the category of vocation — your multitudinous callings as a human being. Perhaps as a professional person, but also as a friend, colleague, family, citizen, creative, lover of the world. How would you begin to name and work through your calling for our time?Practice:Open wide your imagination, your heart, your energy, your will, to the possibility of wholeness. Walk through your days looking around for and making note of emergent visions and practices of wholeness and wisdom even amidst fracture.Every surface of fracture in our world notwithstanding, all of life is being revealed in its insistence on wholeness.______________Talk to us:Instagram: @onbeing Twitter: @kristatippett Email: artofliving@onbeing.org

There is no subject more intriguing than time, and time is so much stranger and more dynamic than the clocks, deadlines, goals, and schedules we live by. In this third offering of ways of seeing and living that have emerged across two decades of On Being, we explore manifold understandings of how time works, and how change happens, that animate lives of wisdom and grace. Deep time. Kairos time. The “200-year present.” The quality of “critical yeast” before and after critical mass. We step into this mystery: a long view of time has a power to replenish our sense of ourselves and the world. It renews us to turn back to the raw materials of our lives in the here and now.______________Consider having a journal nearby as you listen. Return to the prompts below, if you're so inclined, and take them as companions in pondering and living in the days ahead. Maybe invite someone(s) to join you.Ponder:Map your 200-year present as an entry point to sinking into time's capaciousness. It begins with the year of the birth of the oldest person you knew when you were a child, and joins with the hundredth birthday of the youngest person you have held in your arms. For most of us, that's going to be about two centuries that touch our lives directly and that we directly touch.Practice:What does it mean, might it mean, for you to be critical yeast in your world of friendship, work, kinship, community? Live the question. Are you part of yeasty “small groups of people in unlikely combinations, in a new quality of relationship”? Where to begin?This is all another way to talk about planting and growing the generative story of our time: in a noisy, hyper-reactive world, fermenting a “quiet before.”______________Talk to us:Instagram: @onbeingTwitter: @kristatippettEmail: artofliving@onbeing.org

It is a deep truth in life, as in science, that we are shaped as much by the quality of our questions as by our answers. Those moments in our lives when a new question rises up in us, stops us in our tracks, are pivot points. They are openings for discovery and new possibility to break in. Yet it's easy to forget this in a world that is in love with the form of words that is an opinion and the way with words that is an argument.The notion of revering the power of questions — holding them, loving them, living them — is inspired by a phrase of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It has become a discipline woven all the way through Krista's way of seeing the world and the community of conversation and living that is On Being. And it is as relevant as ever before in the post-2020 world. All of the great challenges before our species — ecological, racial, economic, political — are vast, aching, open questions for which we will not have anything like shared answers anytime soon. The deep wisdom behind the notion of living the questions offers both nurture and pragmatic instruction for meeting the callings before us — towards inner grounding, presence to the world, and the possibility of recreating our life together.______________Consider picking up a journal, or something to record with, when you sit down or step out to listen. Take it, and the prompts below, as a companion in listening and your life beyond listening. Also: you might invite someone, or a few others, to join you.Ponder:Turn some curiosity and reverence to the questions that are alive in you, as questions for both yourself and for the world.Practice:Take up living the questions as a practical and spiritual discipline.  Formulate a pivotal question that is rolling around in your life, at that boundary between what is personal and what is public and civilizational. Write it down, hone it, and make a commitment to take it as a companion and guide. Keep it over your shoulder, in your ear, as you move through your life for the time ahead. And find some ritual for staying attentive to what it invites you to see and to move away from and to move towards.If you are faithful to living a question, it will be faithful back to you.______________Talk to us:Instagram: @onbeingTwitter: @kristatippettEmail: artofliving@onbeing.org

We are fluent in the story of our time marked by catastrophe and dysfunction. That is real, and it is grave — but it's not the whole story of us. Here's what this phrase — the generative story, the generative narrative of our time — is insisting on: that there is also an ordinary and abundant reality of learning and growth that is happening, of dignity and care and social creativity and evolution.The great challenges of this century call us to rise to our highest human capacities. They need the landscape of generative people and projects to act like an ecosystem: sharing what we are learning, joining our vulnerabilities, and joining our flourishing.Calling out this reality, naming that there is a generative story of our time, is in fact a way to begin.__________________Consider picking up a journal, or something to record with, when you sit down or step out to listen. Take it, and the prompts below, as a companion in listening and your life beyond listening.Ponder:How would you start to tell the generative story of the world you can see and touch?Practice:Set out to become alert and somewhat reverent of what is good and life-giving in the ordinary encounters of your days: what you read, what you focus on, what you look for and notice in people close to you, and also what you notice in strangers. Let that shape the larger picture of the world that you're working with.__________________Next time: Living the QuestionsFollow us, and talk to us:Instagram: @onbeingTwitter: @kristatippett Email: artofliving@onbeing.org

A new season of big On Being conversations is coming in the new year. But for the next few weeks, we are pulling back the veil on how we're getting grounded for that. On Being Foundations are words and ideas — ways of seeing the world and walking through it — a few tethering understandings towards imagining and walking our way into our callings for now and the future. These have emerged across 20 years of conversation. They are shaping how The On Being Project meets the world that is now unfolding: Seeing the generative story of our timeLiving the questionsTaking a long view of time, and becoming “critical yeast”Calling, and wholenessEach of the four offerings is short, less than 15 minutes — more wisdom practice than podcast episode, and meant to be interactive if you're game. Before you sit down or step out to listen, grab something to write with. Every session comes with an invitation that you can weave through the ordinary interactions of your life, your every day. And the notes to each episode have prompts to support that. As you move through this, let us hear from you: Instagram: @onbeingTwitter: @kristatippettEmail: artofliving@onbeing.orgLet the adventure begin.

Three years ago, Krista texted Pádraig Ó Tuama with a simple question: what if he were to start a poetry podcast that listened as much as it shared? Not long after, Poetry Unbound was born, and it keeps going from strength to strength. Pádraig likes to say that poems are interested in the people who listen to them. And so, as the next season of On Being takes shape for release in early 2023, why not take Poetry Unbound as a listening companion and ritual this fall?Season six of Poetry Unbound just started, and we're sharing the first episode around David Wagoner's beloved poem “Lost” in this feed, the only episode we'll feature here this season. You can listen to the rest on Apple, Spotify, at poetryunbound.org, and wherever podcasts are found. And be sure to subscribe to the show to receive a new episode every Monday and Friday through mid-December.

Krista returns from her summer in Berlin, where her present-day self reunited with the 25-year-old of the 1980s, at large in the divided city. Hear the reflections that emerged from her season of creative rest, and her beloved practices of contemplative reading and journaling.Pull on the thread of emergence with Krista and our Pause newsletter community as the next season of On Being takes shape: onbeing.org/newsletter. You can read the transcript of Krista's letter in our September 17 edition of The Pause.

In some languages, there are words for goodbye that are also a promise of a future "hello," and that's the kind of farewell this is. Krista offers this “see you later” with a parting poem as she and the full team at On Being get a bit restored and dream and make some new things. We are so grateful for your listening.Our podcast feed will be in a period of repose until the fall. In the meantime, join us this summer at onbeing.org/staywithus.

A special offering from Krista Tippett and all of us at On Being: an incredible, celebratory event — listening back and remembering forwards across 20 years of this show in the good company of our beloved friend and former guest, Rev. Jen Bailey, and so many of you. We offer it here as an audio experience, and we think you will enjoy being in the room retroactively. You will hear the voices of wise and graceful lives — of former guests, and of listeners from far-flung places. You may also catch references to things seen and witnessed throughout the event — including a stunning opening poem by our dear friend Maria Popova, composed of On Being show titles — which you can take in fully by viewing the recorded celebration in its entirety on our YouTube channel.Krista will be back next week to send us off with a poem and short farewell — a “see you later” while we rest and dream and make some new things. In the meantime, we will be sharing offerings beyond this podcast. Join us at onbeing.org/staywithus.

“What a time to be alive,” adrienne maree brown has written. “Right now we are in a fast river together — every day there are changes that seemed unimaginable until they occurred.” adrienne maree brown and others use many words and phrases to describe what she does, and who she is: A student of complexity. A student of change and of how groups change together. A “scholar of belonging.” A “scholar of magic.” She grew up loving science fiction, and thought we'd be driving flying cars by now; and yet, has found in speculative fiction the transformative force of vision and imagination that might in fact save us. Our younger listeners have asked to hear adrienne maree brown's voice on On Being, and here she is, as we enter our own time of evolution. This conversation shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking: working with the complex fullness of reality, and cultivating old and new ways of seeing, to move towards a transformative wholeness of living.--In this time of new suns here at On Being, we are in learning mode — listening to the world, and listening to you.Would you take a few minutes to visit onbeing.org/survey and answer a few questions that will help us know who you are and how On Being can accompany you in the time ahead?We would be so grateful…

“What a time to be alive,” adrienne maree brown has written. “Right now we are in a fast river together — every day there are changes that seemed unimaginable until they occurred.” adrienne maree brown and others use many words and phrases to describe what she does, and who she is: A student of complexity. A student of change and of how groups change together. A “scholar of belonging.” A “scholar of magic.” She grew up loving science fiction, and thought we'd be driving flying cars by now; and yet, has found in speculative fiction the transformative force of vision and imagination that might in fact save us. Our younger listeners have asked to hear adrienne maree brown's voice on On Being, and here she is, as we enter our own time of evolution. This conversation shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking: working with the complex fullness of reality, and cultivating old and new ways of seeing, to move towards a transformative wholeness of living.--In this time of new suns here at On Being, we are in learning mode — listening to the world, and listening to you.Would you take a few minutes to visit onbeing.org/survey and answer a few questions that will help us know who you are and how On Being can accompany you in the time ahead?We would be so grateful…

We are in the final weeks as On Being evolves to its next chapter — in a world that is evolving, each of us changed in myriad ways we've only begun to process and fathom. So it felt right to listen again to one of our most beloved shows of this post-2020 world. In fact, Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful Ocean Vuong right on the cusp of that turning, in March 2020, in a joyful and crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. Yet what's most stunning is how presciently and exquisitely Ocean spoke, and continues to speak, to the world we have since come to inhabit — its heartbreak and its poetry, its possibilities for loss and for finding new life.--LISTENING TO OUR LISTENERS - Please take our short (but important) survey! This summer, we're entering creative recharge and learning mode. Would you visit onbeing.org/survey and answer a few questions about who you are and how On Being can accompany you in the time ahead? We would be so grateful

We are in the final weeks as On Being evolves to its next chapter — in a world that is evolving, each of us changed in myriad ways we've only begun to process and fathom. So it felt right to listen again to one of our most beloved shows of this post-2020 world. In fact, Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful Ocean Vuong right on the cusp of that turning, in March 2020, in a joyful and crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. Yet what's most stunning is how presciently and exquisitely Ocean spoke, and continues to speak, to the world we have since come to inhabit — its heartbreak and its poetry, its possibilities for loss and for finding new life.--LISTENING TO OUR LISTENERS - Please take our short (but important) survey! This summer, we're entering creative recharge and learning mode. Would you visit onbeing.org/survey and answer a few questions about who you are and how On Being can accompany you in the time ahead? We would be so grateful

Amidst all of the perspectives and arguments around our ecological future, this much is true: we are not in the natural world — we are part of it. The next-generation marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson would let that reality of belonging show us the way forward. She loves the ocean. She loves human beings. And she's animated by questions emerging from those loves — and from the science she does — which we scarcely know how to take seriously amidst so much demoralizing bad ecological news. This hour, Krista draws out her creative and pragmatic inquiry: Could we let ourselves be led by what we already know how to do, and by what we have it in us to save? What, she asks, if we get this right? This conversation was recorded at the 2022 TED Conference. You can hear all of the talks coming out of the conference by following the TED Talks Daily podcast, wherever podcasts are found.Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, and co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for coastal cities. She's one of the creators of the podcast, “How to Save a Planet,” and she co-edited the wonderful anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. She's also the co-founder of the All We Can Save Project.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Amidst all of the perspectives and arguments around our ecological future, this much is true: we are not in the natural world — we are part of it. The next-generation marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson would let that reality of belonging show us the way forward. She loves the ocean. She loves human beings. And she's animated by questions emerging from those loves — and from the science she does — which we scarcely know how to take seriously amidst so much demoralizing bad ecological news. This hour, Krista draws out her creative and pragmatic inquiry: Could we let ourselves be led by what we already know how to do, and by what we have it in us to save? What, she asks, if we get this right? This conversation was recorded at the 2022 TED Conference. You can hear all of the talks coming out of the conference by following the TED Talks Daily podcast, wherever podcasts are found.Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, and co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for coastal cities. She's one of the creators of the podcast, “How to Save a Planet,” and she co-edited the wonderful anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. She's also the co-founder of the All We Can Save Project.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Ayana Elizabeth Johnson — What If We Get This Right?" Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

The conversation of this hour always rises as an early experience that imprinted everything that came after at On Being. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the wise people in our world. She trained as a doctor in a generation that understood death as a failure of medicine. Yet her lifelong struggle with Crohn's Disease and her pioneering work with cancer patients shaped her view of life. Becoming whole, she teaches, is not about eradicating our wounds and weaknesses; rather, the way we deal with losses, large and small, shapes our capacity to be present to all of our experiences. That arresting notion, and the distinction Rachel Naomi Remen draws between curing and healing, makes this an urgent offering to our world — of healing we are all called to receive and to give.--YOU ARE INVITED!A Listening Party.Celebrating the first 20 years of On Being with Krista.All are welcome — bring friends and family.Visit onbeing.org/staywithus to register and learn more.--Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is founder of the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness and a Professor of Family Medicine at the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University in Ohio. She's also a Clinical Professor Emeritus of Family and Community Medicine at UC San Francisco School of Medicine, that's where she developed “The Healer's Art,” her course for medical students. Her beloved books include Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings. And in September, 2022, she will publish her first book for children: The Birthday of the World: A Story about Finding Light in Everyone and Everything.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in August 2005.

The conversation of this hour always rises as an early experience that imprinted everything that came after at On Being. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the wise people in our world. She trained as a doctor in a generation that understood death as a failure of medicine. Yet her lifelong struggle with Crohn's Disease and her pioneering work with cancer patients shaped her view of life. Becoming whole, she teaches, is not about eradicating our wounds and weaknesses; rather, the way we deal with losses, large and small, shapes our capacity to be present to all of our experiences. That arresting notion, and the distinction Rachel Naomi Remen draws between curing and healing, makes this an urgent offering to our world — of healing we are all called to receive and to give.--YOU ARE INVITED!A Listening Party.Celebrating the first 20 years of On Being with Krista.All are welcome — bring friends and family.Visit onbeing.org/staywithus to register and learn more.--Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is founder of the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness and a Professor of Family Medicine at the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University in Ohio. She's also a Clinical Professor Emeritus of Family and Community Medicine at UC San Francisco School of Medicine, that's where she developed “The Healer's Art,” her course for medical students. Her beloved books include Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings. And in September, 2022, she will publish her first book for children: The Birthday of the World: A Story about Finding Light in Everyone and Everything.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Rachel Naomi Remen — How We Live With Loss." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in August 2005.

It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conversational nature of reality — indeed, this drama of vitality — is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theology, psychology, and leadership — his insistence on the power of a beautiful question and of everyday words amidst the drama of work as well as the drama of life. The notion of “frontier” — inner frontiers, outer frontiers — weaves through this hour. We surface this as a companion for the frontiers we are all on just by virtue of being alive in this time.David Whyte is the author of many books of poetry and prose. He grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father's Yorkshire. He now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. He holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has worked as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands. His books include The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, and The Bell and the Blackbird. His latest collections are David Whyte: Essentials and Still Possible.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in April, 2016.

David Whyte reads his poem, “Everything is Waiting for You.” This poem is featured in David's On Being conversation with Krista, “Seeking Language Large Enough.” Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, and The Bell and the Blackbird. His latest collections are David Whyte: Essentials and Still Possible.

David Whyte reads his poem, “Working Together.” This poem is featured in David's On Being conversation with Krista, “Seeking Language Large Enough.” Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, and The Bell and the Blackbird. His latest collections are David Whyte: Essentials and Still Possible.

David Whyte reads his poem, “Sweet Darkness.” This poem is featured in David's On Being conversation with Krista, “Seeking Language Large Enough.” Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, and The Bell and the Blackbird. His latest collections are David Whyte: Essentials and Still Possible.

It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conversational nature of reality — indeed, this drama of vitality — is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theology, psychology, and leadership — his insistence on the power of a beautiful question and of everyday words amidst the drama of work as well as the drama of life. The notion of “frontier” — inner frontiers, outer frontiers — weaves through this hour. We surface this as a companion for the frontiers we are all on just by virtue of being alive in this time.David Whyte is the author of many books of poetry and prose. He grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father's Yorkshire. He now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. He holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has worked as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands. His books include The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, and The Bell and the Blackbird. His latest collections are David Whyte: Essentials and Still Possible.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "David Whyte — Seeking Language Large Enough." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in April, 2016.

As we approach nearly two decades of On Being, Krista shares a moment from the earliest years of the show that imprinted everything that followed. Hear Krista reflect on her 2005 conversation with Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen — and the wisdom she encountered that accumulated across the years into all The On Being Project is today, and all we continue to become. You, too, can share a memory or experience from an On Being episode that has stayed with you, or made a difference. Record your reflection with ease at onbeing.org/staywithus, where you can also sign up to receive invitations and updates about all that's ahead as we take a new shape in the fall.Thank you in advance for this gift. We look forward to listening.

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what we've falsely compartmentalized as physical, emotional, mental, even spiritual. And so much of what we're seeing brings us back to intelligence that has always been in the very words we use — “gut instinct,” for instance. It brings us back to something your grandmother was right about, for reasons she would never have imagined: you are what you eat. There is so much actionable knowledge in the tour of the ecosystem of our bodies that Kimberley Wilson takes us on this hour. This is science that invites us to nourish the brains we need, young and old, to live in this world. Kimberley Wilson has a private psychotherapy and nutrition practice in central London. She co-hosts the BBC Radio 4 podcast Made of Stronger Stuff and is the author of How to Build a Healthy Brain. She came to the attention of many as a finalist in an early season of The Great British Bake Off. She grew up, as she tells it, eating both the West Indian food of her family and over-processed modern British fare.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.And, this week, an invitation: As you may have heard, after twenty years (!), we are transitioning On Being from a weekly show to a seasonal podcast. We hope you'll help us celebrate these first two decades, by sharing how you've made this adventure of conversation your own.Is there a guest, an idea, or a moment from an episode that has made a difference, that has stayed with you? We've made it easy (and fun) to record your reflection — and at the same time sign up to stay on top of what's happening next: onbeing.org/staywithus. Krista will be offering some of her defining memories, too: in a special online event in June, on social media, and more. So — please and thank you — go to onbeing.org/staywithus.

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what we've falsely compartmentalized as physical, emotional, mental, even spiritual. And so much of what we're seeing brings us back to intelligence that has always been in the very words we use — “gut instinct,” for instance. It brings us back to something your grandmother was right about, for reasons she would never have imagined: you are what you eat. There is so much actionable knowledge in the tour of the ecosystem of our bodies that Kimberley Wilson takes us on this hour. This is science that invites us to nourish the brains we need, young and old, to live in this world. Kimberley Wilson has a private psychotherapy and nutrition practice in central London. She co-hosts the BBC Radio 4 podcast Made of Stronger Stuff and is the author of How to Build a Healthy Brain. She came to the attention of many as a finalist in an early season of The Great British Bake Off. She grew up, as she tells it, eating both the West Indian food of her family and over-processed modern British fare.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Kimberley  Wilson — Whole Body Mental Health." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.And, this week, an invitation: As you may have heard, after twenty years (!), we are transitioning On Being from a weekly show to a seasonal podcast. We hope you'll help us celebrate these first two decades, by sharing how you've made this adventure of conversation your own.Is there a guest, an idea, or a moment from an episode that has made a difference, that has stayed with you? We've made it easy (and fun) to record your reflection — and at the same time sign up to stay on top of what's happening next: onbeing.org/staywithus. Krista will be offering some of her defining memories, too: in a special online event in June, on social media, and more. So — please and thank you — go to onbeing.org/staywithus.

Few books have been more eagerly passed from hand to hand with delight in these last years than Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Krista interviewed her in 2015, and it quickly became a much-loved show as her voice was just rising in common life. Robin is a botanist and also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She's written, “Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss — a bryologist — she describes mosses as the “coral reefs of the forest.” Robin Wall Kimmerer opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate.And, this week, an invitation: Krista recently announced that in June we are transitioning On Being from a weekly show to a seasonal podcast. We hope you'll help us celebrate this threshold, and these first two decades, by sharing how you've made this adventure of conversation your own:Is there a guest, an idea or a moment from an episode that has made a difference, that has stayed with you? We've created a way for you to record your reflection simply — and at the same time sign up to stay on top of what's happening next: onbeing.org/staywithus. Krista will be offering some of her defining memories, too: in a special online event in June, on social media, and more. So — please and thank you — go to onbeing.org/staywithus.Robin Wall Kimmerer is the State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. She is founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She works with tribal nations on environmental problem-solving and sustainability. Part of that work is about recovering lineages of knowledge that were made illegal in the policies of tribal assimilation which did not fully end in the U.S. until the 1970s. Her books include Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in February 2016.