On Being

*Originally published on my Wordpress blog 05.27.2022

I’m a long time fan of the podcast On Being. This podcast, hosted by the articulate, intelligent, and always equanimous Krista Tippett, began life as radio program on NPR in 2003. Its original title was Speaking of Faith and, at the onset, it was relegated to one of those Sunday morning church spots. I would catch it occasionally but didn’t really pick up on the program until it morphed into a podcast and the name changed to On Being. In the beginning, the program had a focus on creating content that would treat religious and spiritual aspects of life as seriously as the media treats politics and economics. Over time it has evolved into something broader, more all-encompassing. As the On Being website explains, On Being “takes up the great questions of meaning in 21st-century lives and [examines the questions] at the intersection of spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and the arts. What does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?”

I often listen to this podcast while taking a very early morning walk in the neighborhood. The predawn darkness and the solitude allow me to focus on the conversations while watching the night sky turn to day. It’s the perfect ambiance for such existential discussions. There are close to 300 episodes in the archives so I have gone back and listened to some more than once. The interviews have introduced me to new ideas, new books, new poems. I sometimes carry ideas from the podcast into conversations out there in my own world. Anyone who knows me well, knows I have a reflective and curious child living in me who gets so excited about mystery, art, ideas, and connections. That young person owes a lot of gratitude to Krista Tippett and the On Being staff.

I was thinking of highlighting just three episodes that had an impact on me but, when I went to the website, I found this page which is so much better than I could have done. It’s called Starting Points
(https://onbeing.org/starting-points/) and it is wonderfully curated collection of some of the best loved shows. It gives a short synopsis that give the reader a place to start exploring the podcast. Ms. Tippett has interviewed guests ranging from poets to physicists, doctors to historians, artists to activists. Her guests include the 14th Dalai Lama, Maya Angelou, Mohammed Fairouz, Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rosanne Cash, Wangari Maathai, Yo-Yo Ma, Paulo Coehlo, Brian Greene, John Polkinghorne, Jean Vanier, Joanna Macy, Sylvia Earle, David Whyte, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Mary Oliver, Jane Goodell, Sharon Salzberg, Sylvia Boorstein, Esther Perel, Elie Wiesel and so many others.

One thing I really like about the website is that you can listen and/or download the episode but you can also see a transcript of the episode. I appreciate that as I often want to go back and read some particular part of the conversation or I want to capture the words on paper for future reference.

And, yes, that graphic at the top of the page appears not to be an error. The graphic for the program always appears as O Being. There has to be a story about that somewhere but I can't find it.

Here are summaries for just three recent episodes that I enjoyed. Perhaps you will find these and others as engaging as I do.

David Whyte: Seeking Language Large Enough

“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.”

Sylvia Boorstein: What We Nurture

A few years ago, Krista hosted an event in Detroit — a city in flux — on the theme of raising children. The conversation that resulted with the Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Sylvia Boorstein has been a companion to her and to many from that day forward. Here it is again as an offering for Mother’s Day — in a world still and again in flux, and where the matter of raising new human beings feels as complicated as ever before. Sylvia gifts us this teaching: that nurturing children’s inner lives can be woven into the fabric of our days — and that nurturing ourselves is also good for the children and everyone else in our lives.

Pádraig Ó Tuama: “This fantastic argument of being alive”

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a friend, teacher, and colleague to the work of On Being. But before that was true, Krista took a revelatory trip to meet him at his home in Northern Ireland, a place that has known sectarianism and violent fracture and has evolved, not to perfection, yet to new life and once unimaginable repair and relationship. Our whole world screams of fracture, more now than when Krista sat with Pádraig in 2016. This conversation is a gentle, welcoming landing for pondering and befriending hard realities we are given. As the global educator Karen Murphy, another friend of On Being and of Pádraig, once said to Krista: “Let’s have the humility and the generosity to step back and learn from these places that have had the courage to look at themselves and look at where they’ve been and try to forge a new path with something that resembles ‘together’ … Right now we should be taking these stories and these examples and these places and filling our pockets and our lungs and our hearts and our minds with them and learning deeply.” And that’s what this hour with Pádraig invites.

Oh!  One More!  MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE ONE

John O’Donohue: The Inner Landscape of Beauty

No conversation we’ve ever done has been more beloved than this one. The Irish poet, theologian, and philosopher insisted on beauty as a human calling. He had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with the inner landscape of our lives and with what he called “the invisible world” that is constantly intertwining what we can know and see. This was one of the last interviews he gave before his unexpected death in 2008. But John O’Donohue’s voice and writings continue to bring ancient mystical wisdom to modern confusions and longings.

And his poem:

John O’Donohue: Beannacht

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The gray window
And the ghost of loss
Gets in to you,
May a flock of colors,
Indigo, red, green,
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
.
When the canvas frays
In the curragh of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.