Our colleague Lucas Johnson catches up with one of his mentors, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons. Now a member of the National Council of Elders, she was a teenager when she joined the Mississippi Freedom Summer. She shares what she has learned about exhaustion and self-care, spiritual practice and community, while engaging in civil rights organizing and deep social healing. Dr. Simmons was raised Christian and later converted to the Sufi tradition of Islam.

Lucas Johnson leads The On Being Project's work in social healing as Executive Director of Civil Conversations and Social Healing. He is a community organizer, writer, and a minister in the American Baptist Churches. Read his full bio here.

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons is assistant professor of religion at the University of Florida and a member of the National Council of Elders. Her account of her work as an activist in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is featured in the book, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC.

It feels good and right this week to sit with the beloved writer Nikki Giovanni’s signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She’s also a professor at Virginia Tech, where she brought beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there. And she’s an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to us all — at home in her body and in the world of her lifetime even while she sees and delights in the beyond of it.

Nikki Giovanni is a University Distinguished Professor in the English department at Virginia Tech. She has written and edited numerous books of poetry and works for children, including Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgment, and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Her latest work is Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired on March 17, 2016.

It feels good and right this week to sit with the beloved writer Nikki Giovanni’s signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She’s also a professor at Virginia Tech, where she brought beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there. And she’s an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to us all — at home in her body and in the world of her lifetime even while she sees and delights in the beyond of it.

Nikki Giovanni is a University Distinguished Professor in the English department at Virginia Tech. She has written and edited numerous books of poetry and works for children, including Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgment, and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Her latest work is Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode Nikki Giovanni — ‘We go forward with a sanity and a love’ Find more at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired on March 17, 2016.

“Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world, we hunger for more.” These are words from Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek in his book, A Beautiful Question. It’s a winsome, joyful meditation on the question: Do cosmic realities embody beautiful ideas? — probing the world, by way of science, as a work of art. He reminds us that time and space, mystery and order, are so much stranger and more generous than we can comprehend. He’s now written a wonderful new book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

Frank Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004, he received the Nobel Prize in physics. His books include A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design and The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. His new book is Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired April 28, 2016.

“Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world, we hunger for more.” These are words from Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek in his book, A Beautiful Question. It’s a winsome, joyful meditation on the question: Do cosmic realities embody beautiful ideas? — probing the world, by way of science, as a work of art. He reminds us that time and space, mystery and order, are so much stranger and more generous than we can comprehend. He’s now written a wonderful new book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

Frank Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004, he received the Nobel Prize in physics. His books include A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design and The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. His new book is Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Frank Wilczek — Beauty as a Compass for Truth." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Underpinning all the great challenges of our time there is the human drama, the human condition. And as we move beyond 2020, we turn to Mary Catherine Bateson to help us understand the puzzle of being ourselves, of rising to our best capacities and gifts, in all of our complexity and strangeness. She is the daughter of the great anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and she is a linguist and anthropologist herself.

Mary Catherine Bateson - is Professor Emerita at George Mason University. Her books include a memoir of her life with her parents Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson called With a Daughter's Eye, as well as her bestselling book Composing a Life. Most recently, she is the co-author of Thinking Race: Social Myths and Biological Realities, published nearly 50 years after her mother’s A Rap on Race with James Baldwin.

This show originally aired in October, 2015.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

Underpinning all the great challenges of our time there is the human drama, the human condition. And as we move beyond 2020, we turn to Mary Catherine Bateson to help us understand the puzzle of being ourselves, of rising to our best capacities and gifts, in all of our complexity and strangeness. She is the daughter of the great anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and she is a linguist and anthropologist herself.

Mary Catherine Bateson - is Professor Emerita at George Mason University. Her books include a memoir of her life with her parents Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson called With a Daughter's Eye, as well as her bestselling book Composing a Life. Most recently, she is the co-author of Thinking Race: Social Myths and Biological Realities, published nearly 50 years after her mother’s A Rap on Race with James Baldwin.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Mary Catherine Bateson —Living as an Improvisational Art." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Gaelynn Lea’s voice and violin land like a balm — an offering of both clarity and gladness that can still be mustered in this midwinter, this upended Christmas season. She first came to the attention of many when she won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016. This fiddler and singer-songwriter moves through the world in an electric wheelchair, and plays the violin like a cello because of the disability she was born with — a genetic condition that has made her bones more breakable. So much of what she’s learned through life in her body lands as wisdom, right now.

Gaelynn Lea -- is a violinist and singer-songwriter from Duluth, Minnesota. Her albums include All the Roads that Lead Us Home, Learning How to Stay, and most recently, The Living Room Sessions: Gaelynn Lea LIVE.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Gaelynn Lea’s voice and violin land like a balm — an offering of both clarity and gladness that can still be mustered in this midwinter, this upended Christmas season. She first came to the attention of many when she won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016. This fiddler and singer-songwriter moves through the world in an electric wheelchair, and plays the violin like a cello because of the disability she was born with — a genetic condition that has made her bones more breakable. So much of what she’s learned through life in her body lands as wisdom, right now.

Gaelynn Lea -- is a violinist and singer-songwriter from Duluth, Minnesota. Her albums include All the Roads that Lead Us Home, Learning How to Stay, and most recently, The Living Room Sessions: Gaelynn Lea LIVE.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Gaelynn Lea’s Voice and Violin.” Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

“We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith — a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.” That’s the message the philosopher, poet, and historian, Jennifer Michael Hecht, puts at the center of her unusual writing about suicide. She’s traced how Western civilization has, at times, demonized those who died by suicide, and, at times, celebrated it as a moral freedom. She has struggled with suicidal places in her life and lost friends to it. She proposes a new cultural understanding based on our essential need for each other.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, Doubt: A History, and Who Said.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired on March 26, 2014.