On Being with Krista Tippett

We’re in a season of renewal in the natural world and in spiritual traditions; both Easter and Passover this year are utterly transformed. It’s drawing us back to the wisdom of Br. David Steindl-Rast, who makes useful distinctions around experiences that are life-giving and resilience-making yet can feel absurd to speak of in a moment like this. A Benedictine monk for over 60 years, Steindl-Rast was formed by 20th-century catastrophes. He calls joy “the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.” And his gratefulness is not an easy gratitude or thanksgiving — but a full-blooded, reality-based practice and choice.

Br. David Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk and a beloved teacher and author on the subject of gratitude. He’s the founder and senior advisor for A Network for Grateful Living. His books include Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness, A Listening Heart, and an autobiography, i am through you so i.

This show originally aired in January 2016.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "David Steindl-Rast — How to Be Grateful in Every Moment (But Not for Everything)." Find more at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Leanne O’Sullivan’s poem “Leaving Early,” the poet writes to her ill husband, entrusting him into the care of a nurse named Fionnuala. As the novel coronavirus sweeps the globe, many of us can’t physically be there for loved ones who are sick. Instead, it is the health care workers — and all involved in the health care system — who are tirelessly present, caring for others in spite of exhaustion and the risk it brings to their own well being.

We offer this episode of Poetry Unbound in profound gratitude toward all who are working in health care right now.

“Leaving Early” comes from Leanne O’Sullivan’s book A Quarter of an Hour. Thank you to the publisher, Bloodaxe Books, who gave us permission to use Leanne’s poem. Read it on our website at onbeing.org.

Find the transcript for this episode at onbeing.org.

The original music in this episode was composed by Gautam Srikishan.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ai-jen Poo is a next-generation labor organizer who co-founded a beautiful and muscular movement with caregivers and those who employ them: The National Domestic Workers Alliance. For over two decades, she has been reinventing policy and engaging a deep conversation that has now met its civilizational moment. This conversation was recorded before “coronavirus” was a word we all knew. But the many dimensions of the crisis now upon us have revealed Ai-jen Poo and her world of wisdom and action as teachers for our life together, in and beyond it.

Ai-jen Poo is executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the co-director of Caring Across Generations. Her book is The Age of Dignity. Her podcast, co-hosted with Alicia Garza, is Sunstorm.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ai-jen Poo is a next-generation labor organizer who co-founded a beautiful and muscular movement with caregivers and those who employ them: The National Domestic Workers Alliance. For over two decades, she has been reinventing policy and engaging a deep conversation that has now met its civilizational moment. This conversation was recorded before “coronavirus” was a word we all knew. But the many dimensions of the crisis now upon us have revealed Ai-jen Poo and her world of wisdom and action as teachers for our life together, in and beyond it. 

Ai-jen Poo is executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the co-director of Caring Across Generations. Her book is The Age of Dignity. Her podcast, co-hosted with Alicia Garza, is Sunstorm.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Ai-jen Poo — This Is Our (Caring) Revolution." Find more at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“If I believe that we are all inherently worthy just by being human, how can I feel that way when I feel I’m doing ‘nothing?’” — Anna Bondoc from Los Angeles

So many of us are raised to believe that hard work is what makes us valuable; many of our professions and even our identities as helpers are on hold. How does self-worth interact with just being when we feel we're doing nothing? Krista reflects on the problem with the phrase “just being” — and how settling inside ourselves right now, and kindness towards ourselves, are gifts to the world we want to make beyond this crisis.

Living the Questions is an occasional On Being segment where Krista muses on questions from our listening community. Submit your own at [email protected].

Krista Tippett created and leads the On Being Project, hosts the On Being radio show and podcast, and curates the Civil Conversations Project. She received the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2014. She speaks widely and writes books including Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. Read her full bio here.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this unsettled moment, we’re returning to the shows we’re longing to hear again. Among them is this 2019 conversation with writer Ross Gay. The ephemeral nature of our being allows him to find delight in all sorts of places (especially his community garden). To be with Gay is to train your gaze to see the wonderful alongside the terrible; to attend to and meditate on what you love, even in the midst of difficult realities and as part of working for justice.

In our world of so much suffering, it can feel hard or wrong to invoke the word "joy." Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying cries in almost every life-giving conversation that Krista has had across recent months and years, even and especially with people on the front lines of humanity's struggles. 

Ross Gay helps illuminate this paradox and turn it into a muscle.

We are good at fighting, as he puts it, and not as good at holding in our imaginations what is to be adored and preserved and exalted — advocating for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. But without this, he says, we cannot speak meaningfully even about our longings for a more just world, a more whole existence for all. To understand that we are all suffering — and so to practice tenderness and mercy —  is a quality of what Ross calls “adult joy." Starting with his cherished essay collection 

The Book of Delights, he began to accompany many in an everyday spiritual discipline of practicing delight and cultivating joy.

Ross Gay is a poet, essayist, teacher, and passionate community gardener. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he’s a professor of English at Indiana University. His books include The Book of Delights, The Book of (More) Delights, and Inciting Joy, as well as the poetry collections Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Be Holding.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Ross Gay — On the Insistence of Joy." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up to become their brothers’ keepers,” Rebecca Solnit writes. “And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amidst death, chaos, fear, and loss.” In this moment of global crisis, we’re returning to the conversations we’re longing to hear again and finding useful right now. A singular writer and thinker, Solnit celebrates the unpredictable and incalculable events that so often redeem our lives, both solitary and public. She searches for the hidden, transformative histories inside and after events we chronicle as disasters in places like post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.   

Rebecca Solnit is a columnist at The Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub. Her many books include Hope in the Dark, A Paradise Built in Hell, and her most recent, Recollections of My Nonexistence.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in May 2016.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up to become their brothers’ keepers,” Rebecca Solnit writes. “And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amidst death, chaos, fear, and loss.” In this moment of global crisis, we’re returning to the conversations we’re longing to hear again and finding useful right now. A singular writer and thinker, Solnit celebrates the unpredictable and incalculable events that so often redeem our lives, both solitary and public. She searches for the hidden, transformative histories inside and after events we chronicle as disasters in places like post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.   

Rebecca Solnit is a columnist at The Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub. Her many books include Hope in the Dark, A Paradise Built in Hell, and her most recent, Recollections of My Nonexistence.

This show originally aired in May 2016.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Rebecca Solnit — Falling Together" Find more at onbeing.org.

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli says humans don’t understand the world as made by things, “we understand the world made by kisses, or things like kisses — happenings.” This everyday truth is as scientific as it is philosophical and political, and it unfolds with unexpected nuance in his science. Rovelli is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity theory and author of the tiny, bestselling book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time. Seeing the world through his eyes, we understand that there is no such thing as “here” or “now.” Instead, he says, our senses convey a picture of reality that narrows our understanding of its fullness.

Carlo Rovelli is a professor of physics at Aix-Marseille University, where he is director of the quantum gravity group in the Center for Theoretical Physics. He is also director of the Samy Maroun Research Center for Time, Space, and the Quantum. His books include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and, most recently, The Order of Time.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in March 2017.

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.