You could say of the present that we are suddenly in a world of “ambiguous loss.” Family therapist and clinical psychologist Pauline Boss coined this term, and invented a new field within psychology, to name the reality that every loss does not  hold a promise of anything like resolution. There are “complicated griefs” that shift the world on its axis from one day to the next, with no going back to the world of before and no time to set things in order. This conversation is full of practical intelligence for shedding assumptions about how we should be feeling and acting that deepen stress precisely in a moment like this. It offers wisdom and concrete tools for becoming more meaningfully present to what is actually going on inside ourselves and for others.

Pauline Boss — Navigating Loss Without Closure

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Fall 2023 season now available for listening in full: on the intelligence that lives in the human body — and, beyond the hype and the doom, what is the new AI calling us to as human beings? With Kate Bowler, Kerry Washington, Nick Cave, Reid Hoffman, Latanya Sweeney, Baratunde Thurston, Sara Hendren, Matthew Sanford, Clint Smith, and Christiana Figueres. 

Also: a 20-year archive of beloved, celebrated, revelatory shows, with Mary Oliver, John O'Donohue, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ada Limón, Isabel Wilkerson, Desmond Tutu. And so much more. 

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

Wisdom, Solace, and Courage for 2024

Here are some experiences to which Nick Cave gives voice and song: the "universal condition" of yearning, and of loss; a "spirituality of rigor"; and the transcendent and moral dimensions of what music is about. This Australian musician, writer, and actor first made a name in the wild world of ’80s post-punk and later with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He also underwent public struggles with addiction and rehab.

Since the accidental death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015, and a few years later, the death of his eldest child Jethro, he has entered yet another transfigured era, co-created an exquisite book called Faith, Hope and Carnage, and become a frank and eloquent interlocutor on grief. As a human and a songwriter, Nick Cave is an embodiment of a life examined and evolved. He sat with Krista in the On Being studio in Minneapolis, and the gorgeous conversation that followed is woven in this episode with his gorgeous music.

Nick Cave — Loss, Yearning, Transcendence

A little musing on this season, the spectacular finale headed your way — and ways to stay connected in the time ahead.

A Word from Krista

Our built world is designed around something called "normal," and yet every single one of our bodies is mysterious, and constantly adapting for better or worse — and always, always changing. This is a fact so ordinary — and yet not something most of us routinely pause to know and to ponder and work with. But Sara Hendren has made it her passion, bringing to it her varied vocations and gifts: being a painter and loving how art reveals truth not by way of simplicity, but by juxtaposition; teaching design to engineering students; parenting three beloved children, one of whom has Down syndrome. 

This is a conversation that will have you moving through the world both marveling at the ordinary adaptations that bodies make and asking, in Sara's words, "restless and generative questions": of why we organize the physical world as though vulnerability and needs for assistance are not commonplace — indeed salutary — forms of experience that reveal the genius of what being human is all about.

Sara Hendren — Our Bodies, Aliveness, and the Built World

The ecological crisis we are standing before is at once civilizational and personal — intimately close to each of us in the places we love and inhabit, and unfolding at a species level. And as much as anyone alive on the planet now, Christiana Figueres has felt the overwhelm of this and stepped into service. She gives voice so eloquently to the grief that we feel and must allow to bind us to each other — and what she sees as a spiritual evolution the natural world is calling us to. 

If you have wondered how to keep hope alive amidst a thousand reasons to despair, if you are ready to take your despair as fuel — intrigued by the idea of stepping into love and immediate realities of abundance and regeneration — this conversation is for you.

Pauline Boss — Navigating Loss Without Closure

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