← On Being with Krista Tippett
On Being with Krista Tippett
Joan Baez — "This Gift of a Voice"
00:57:54
She is known as the voice of a generation. The Queen of Folk. A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington. As much as anyone, Joan Baez embodied the spirit of that decade of soaring dreams and songs and dramas set in motion that echo through this world of ours. Meanwhile, her love affair with a young Minnesota singer-songwriter calling himself Bob Dylan, whose career she pivotally helped launch, is also reentering the public imagination with a big new movie. And her classic heartbreak hit about him, “Diamonds and Rust,” is topping global charts anew. But Joan Baez at 83 is so much more intriguing than her projection as a legend. She grew up the daughter of a Mexican physicist father and a Scottish mother in a seemingly idyllic family. But even at the height of her fame, she was struggling mightily with mysterious interior demons. She and her beloved sisters finally reckoned in midlife with a truth of abus...
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Support for On Being with Krista Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Learn more@fetzer.org we are not afraid we are not afraid we are not afraid to
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she was called the voice of a generation, the Queen of Folk, a legend, an icon, the one who sang We Shall Overcome alongside Martin Luther King Jr. At the 1963 March on Washington.
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We shall overcome someday we shall overcome we shall overcome.
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As much as anyone, Paez embodied the spirit of that decade of soaring dreams and song and dramas set in motion that echo through this world of ours. Meanwhile, her love affair with a young Minnesota singer songwriter calling himself Bob Dylan, whose career she pivotally helped launch, is also re entering the public imagination with a big new movie and her classic heartbreak hit About Him, Diamonds and Rust is topping global charts anew. But Joan Baez, at 83, is so much more intriguing than her projection as a legend. She grew up the daughter of a Mexican born physicist father and a Scottish mother in a seemingly idyllic family. But even at the height of her fame, she she was struggling mightily with mysterious interior demons. She and her beloved sisters finally reckoned in midlife with a truth of abuse they had buried even in memory at great cost. So Joan Baez has reckoned with fracture inside herself and been on an odyssey of wholeness. She is frank and funny, irreverent and wise. Among other gifts, she offers a refreshing way into what it means to see, sing and to live the reality of overcoming personal and civilizational I spoke with Joan Baez on stage at the Chicago Humanities Festival in October 2024, and I'm so happy to share this conversation with you.
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A
Hi. Hello.
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B
I'm so happy to be back at the Chicago Humanities Festival and grateful to this festival for bringing me together with Joan Baez. I said to you it's about time, it's about time. I know I said to you backstage I've been inching towards you and when this invitation came in, I love that I get to interview now as a published poet, which would not have been true before now. And it really you're gonna be hearing a lot from this book when you see my mother ask her to dance. It is a wonderful book of poetry and it's really an exquisite entry point, I think, to kind of who you are and the life you've lived and this complex dance of your life between music and and being human and social activism and love of the world and love of life itself. And I'm gonna, as I said, I'm gonna ask you to read quite a few poems and we'll dive in in that way. And I'd like to start where I always start by wondering about how you think about the spiritual background of your life, of your childhood. So fascinated when I just, you know, the facts that I have. You have a Scottish mother and a Mexican born father. You have a paternal grandfather who left the Catholic church and became a Methodist minister and another grandfather who was an Episcopal minister. And your family converted to Quakerism. And I wonder, well, I wonder how that imprinted you, but also if there are other ways you'd talk about how you now look back and think about that aspect of your upbringing.
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Well, I think that as kids, we all hated Quaker meeting. There was nothing to do, sit around looking at each other, waiting for some boring old Quaker to get up and talk. And that's what it is for kids, you know. But what stayed with me in the end was the silence. And it's been a part of my life, an important part of my life ever since. It's in the meditation, it's in where I love to be, which is just in the woods and talking to the trees in the creek and just meditative and quietness. That's been a big part of my life. And I mean, I have to thank my parents, whom we hated at the time because we didn't want to be dragged off to this awful, boring hour of silence. They finally got smart and said, okay, the kids can leave after 20 minutes. Yay. Hallelujah.
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B
I mean, so you experienced silence as a medium of spiritual life, or maybe just a medium of this ritual you had to endure. And you had this gift of a voice of. Of song. And I mean, I wonder, I'm so curious about your relationship with your extraordinary voice. I mean, there's some mystery to having a voice like the one you were born with.
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A
It's mostly mystery. Yeah, it is. I don't know where it came from. And I do know that now I can play the early music. It's not listening. It's not me. It's really listening to somebody else because it's this gorgeous soprano, which I don't have at all now, so I can listen in wonder to what was. And it was the gift, you know, that I was born with.
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B
And even when you were young, did you perceive it in that way? As a gift?
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A
As a gift, yeah. I didn't know the magnitude of it, you know, but I've always known it was a gift and the second gift went with it was the desire to use it and the ways that I've used it.
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B
No, right. And you.
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A
Yeah, thank you.
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I mean, it wasn't just a voice. It isn't just a voice that was appreciated, merely appreciated and beloved and moving for listeners, but really a voice of an era. And I want to talk, I want to talk a lot about that. I'm thinking a lot these days about the echoes between the 1960s and the 70s and now. And I think you have some wonderful wisdom for us about that. And you know, I watched you did this documentary in 2023 called I Am a Noise and I wonder if people haven't seen it. I absolutely recommend it. Some people have seen it and I just, you know, here was how the documentary described. Here was the description, which I think is pretty good, kind of naming what you have straddled in your life. Right at the end of a 60 year career, legendary singer and activist Joan Baez takes an honest look back and a deep look inward as she tries to make sense of her large history making life and the personal struggle she's kept private. And this book of poetry is kind of you further offering up and sharing how you've been looking inside and what you've been learning and how you've been growing. And I actually feel like the first poem in the book, which I'm going to ask you to read is what you call the author's note.
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Oh, okay.
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Yeah, poetry and me.
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Okay, what page you got?
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And oh, do you have it? Great. Okay.
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Okay. Yeah. This should explain my entire life to you, kind of an author's note. What do I want to say to you who has by chance or design picked up this little book that it is filled with unschooled techniques, undisciplined phrasing, haphazard thoughts, and much channeling from sources residing within me and sources unknown. It's filled with mystery and clarity, fire and darkness, blunders and eurekas, deities and demons. Some thoughts and images arrived on lightning. Some crept up from deep below the damp sod. Early drafts of many poems in this book were written between 1991 and 1997. During that time I wrote obsessively. I was in part writing for many little authors, or they for me. In 1990, I began therapy that led to a diagnosis of associative identity disorder. That's clinical speak for developing multiple personalities as a way of coping with long term trauma. Some of the poems in this collection are heavily influenced by or in effect written by some of the inner authors. Together we were swept up effortlessly in a tidal wave of imagery and words and discovered what we already knew. Poetry is like love. It can't be forced. All we could do was await its birth and celebrate its arrival.
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So that beautiful young woman with the. Woman with the pure, glorious voice was wrestling with a lot of demons or suppressing a lot of demons in those years in which you made such an impact and impression on the imagination of an entire time. You know, I remember watching, you know, in the documentary, you don't you learn what's happening. Right. As it goes on. And I remember, you know, there's a lot in the beginning of, you know, you and your sisters struggling with anxiety and phobias and trouble sleeping and. And it really didn't make sense.
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Right, right, right.
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And that's what you finally had to kind of walk towards.
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Yeah. I had wonderful therapists from the age 15 on, and they helped me deal with the anxiety and the depression. I didn't know what that was. You know, it was just what my life had been. But they got me around and under and over issues and help me survive and have some kind of quality of life. That at a certain point, just when the poetry began, I decided I really had to bite the bullet and go down wherever it was and find what was causing all this stuff. So it's in the poems. I just took a deep dive by way of hypnosis, guided imagery. I mean, this doctor was wonderful. He sent me off to. To dance, to throw stuff, scream, to a lot of dancing, draw, do poetry, you know, just keep. It just kept. The stuff kept coming out. Good stuff, you know. And over that, during that time, which took a number of years, I realized I was feeling better and better. You know, I think in the film it says, I feel whole. I had no way to judge that. It was just a new feeling. And I felt like a whole person instead of splits.
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B
Do you know the poet Naomi Shihav Nye? Are you familiar with her? She is really a beautiful teacher about writing in general. And one of the things she says about writing, writing in general, but writing poetry in particular, that it brings us into conversation with the many selves inside ourselves. But for you, that was really much more literal because you found. And you realized, and you and your sisters together realized that you were. That there had been trauma and abuse in your family with your beloved father, and that you literally. You talk about having this family of inner people. And some of these poems are attributed to specific inner people and sounds like you became acquainted with them.
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Oh, I did, yeah. I mean. And by the way, we're all happy to be here this evening. When we talk about them publicly, they're kind of like peeping around the corner. What about me? What about me? So, yes, we're comfortable here tonight. But, yeah, sometimes. I mean, before I understood this, I'd be writing. I'd be writing poetry and I'd read the thing. Gosh, that doesn't seem like something I would have written. And down the bottom, maybe sign somebody else's name.
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B
Really? You would just find the name signed?
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Yeah. And that's sometimes how I became acquainted with the person, you know? This is also insane to somebody who doesn't. Who is first exposed to it. But by the end of the hour, you'll probably be used to it. It's too crazy for me to comprehend, so stick with me. Yeah.
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You know, I mean, I have to say, to be clear,
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and I do
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want to tease out a little bit the difference between writing poetry and writing poetry song. Because you had been writing poetry all along. And actually, I have to say congratulations. That Diamonds and Rust just hit the UK charts again in 2024.
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That was so crazy.
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Just in the last couple of days. And that was about your. A relationship with Bob Dylan. And, you know, knowing that I was going to speak with you, I just. I went back and listened to it. And it is such a poem. It is such a sung poem. I'm just going to read some of the lines. It starts with, well, I'll be damned, Here comes your ghost again. You know, here I sit, hand on the telephone, hearing a voice I'd known a couple of light years ago, Heading straight for a fall. Now you're telling me you're not nostalgic? Then give me another word for it. You, who are so good with words and at keeping things vague. Because I need some of that vagueness now it's all come back to clearly. Yes, I loved you dearly. And if you're offering me diamonds in rust, I've already paid.
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I'm still waiting for the diamonds. Not going to happen.
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And then there's this. As I remember, your eyes were bluer than robin's eggs. My poetry was lousy, you said so. He was wrong.
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He was wrong.
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I wonder if you would read the first poem in the book, which is called Goodbye to the Black and White Ball, which also tells some of the story you've been talking about on page 21. But what I'd like you to do is just. It's a long poem and I'd like you to read half of it and then we'll come back to the rest of it later. So read up to It Might be diamonds. Okay, if you don't mind doing that. Splitting the poem in half.
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Okay. I used to think the alternative to black and white must be gray. To avoid living a dull life, I dressed in black and white. I thought in black and white. Not just good or bad, mind you, but perfect or damned, gifted or worthless, ethereal or demonic, emblazoned or cast out. I scoffed at anything average and avoided middle ground. You know, the gray area. As a result, I let slip most of my life. I was chronically anxious, insomniac, promiscuous, multiphobic, depressed, hyper vigilant, and luckily, immensely talented. I had antennae that could turn the corner ahead of me and protect me from the mortal danger of, say, eating dinner in a restaurant or make a new friend. You know, the gray area. When I was half a century old, I tore off the antennae and turned my life over to a power greater than myself, which by that point could have been a toothpick. I pitched myself into a sea of memories and headed blindly like a hoodwinked shark for the marrow of the inner core. Me. I pictured pustules of venom. But my therapist suggested it might be diamonds.
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They're diamonds again. You know, poetry's become really important in my work. And it took me by surprise. I didn't see it coming. I think my interest is in the human condition. And I'm always looking. I think that is what underlies things that we analyze in political terms and economic terms and sociological terms. And so when I think. And I. You know, what I've experienced across the years is that poetry gives, you know, has a way of giving voice to things that other forms of words simply cannot. But. And I guess I'm so curious about, you know, where poetry comes from in us and what it works in us that is distinctive. And I just wonder how you've thought about that, how you sense that.
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A
I don't know how to answer questions like that because I didn't think about any of it. I just started it. You know, it's the way I've done the drawings and the paintings and the way I did the music. No, I just kind of came out that way. I mean, out of my mom. Just on output, on creative output. And I never questioned. I think I never questioned how I was doing any of it, or I wouldn't have done a book of upside down drawings if I tried to figure that out. What a bore. I guess I just do it and I don't think about it.
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But I do sense that you feel like these particular insights and truths could only have come out, could only have found expression through the form of words. That is poetry. Or at least right now.
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Well, I don't know, because whatever happens when I get in the art studio and start painting, just another form of letting it rip. I mean, I never studied any of it. And the best advice I got from a painter friend of mine when I said, if you had one thing to say to an aspiring artist like myself, what would you say? And she said, make as many mistakes as you can see. And so I'm painting a portrait and it gets really too picky or I'm trying to make it look too carefully like somebody. I drop it in the swimming pool and pull it out. And if that isn't bad enough, I dunk it again. And depending on how wet the paint was to begin with, you get different possibilities. But it all transforms. It transforms the painting, in my opinion, in my experience, gives it a new life. And that's not something that's really explainable.
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Was the experience, did it feel different from when you were writing songs decades ago?
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I think they're very different things. And one would assume that if I had written a good poem, oh, I'd be able to put that into music. And that was not my experience at all. And most of singer songwriter friends I have said it doesn't work that way. You can't just grab a poem and make it into a song. I was relieved to hear that. I thought it was just me, but it's pretty much accepted. Yeah, yeah.
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You, you know, you lived a lot of life straddling your, as that, that description said, your history making life and your personal struggles that you kept hidden, you waited a few decades to excavate that. And also you, you know, your social activism, which was also such a huge part of who you were and such a huge part of your legacy, was very distracting. Right? I mean, nobly distracting.
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That's a nice way to put it. Nobly distracting, yeah.
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From this personal work in a way.
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Not really in a way, no. When people used to say, or still say, you really have to get yourself sort of like healed before you can heal somebody else. And I haven't found that to be true because you just can't. You have to do it all at the same time. So when I was doing all of that stuff, I mean, that particular therapist was smart enough to say, go on the road, you know, just get out of here. Whereas the other style was we need you to five days a week on the couch, you know, and we both knew that wasn't going to fly. So I went out there and did everything. Everything all at once. Tried to, anyway.
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And I mean, your, you know, the songs you sang and wrote about and the context in which you operated were really often very hard, dramatic edges of American and global reality. And, you know, we shall singing We shall overcome at the 1963 March on Washington or the Night They Drove Old Dixie down, or Birmingham Sunday, which is an absolutely hauntingly beautiful soft song about the murder of those four little girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church. I'm, you know, as I said a minute ago, I'm really thinking a lot these days at this time in the life of the world about the 1960s and how this loop of time, of meaning and searching and how kind of what we think we know about movement building and social change and activism comes from that time. And yet we're formed as much by what was left undone as what was accomplished.
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And also the, you know, ridiculous stage has been set now for what's going on now. Because back in the day, nobody could have written or thought up, could have written what. What's going on now? There wasn't anything in the vocabulary.
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Yeah, I'm talking more about, like, the racial reckoning, which. Which. And yes. And so much was accomplished and so much was left for us to rise to. Right. For future generations to. To complete. And that hasn't been completed.
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Well, that's assuming there will be future generations. I mean, seriously.
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Well, that's a whole other conversation, kind of.
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But, you know, it's all in the context of that. Our backdrop is global warming. Everything that we do, we get angst about and we do it. That is the backdrop, is we don't know how long we're going to be here. Certainly not as long as we thought we would. So I think that's important to put in the picture that it changes the way you think and act, maybe makes your life more vital in some ways and not to be dragged down. I mean, I think it's really important to live in denial. Live in denial 95% of the time so you can breathe and have a Life and then 5% of the time, go make some good trouble. Go do stuff.
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B
And I mean, I think by live in denial you also mean. I mean, it's so hard now. We're so inundated with so many sources of information and so many vivid images of terrible things that we can't touch. And so are you also talking about a kind of discipline of attending to what you can do?
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I heard somebody say hope is a muscle. That made sense to me because I don't have a whole lot of hope, naturally. But I think I was also very pessimistic. And people assume that I'm an optimist. And I heard somebody, I don't know what the context was, saying to be optimistic can be silly, be pessimistic is a waste of time. And I found that very helpful. Do you.
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B
So I want to say also, I mean, you know, the activism that you were engaged in then was also very intimate and organic to you. Right. I mean, you were integrating schools in Mississippi. And you also had had an experience growing up of being part Mexican and experiencing racism. And I mean, you know, the drama of that time, the Vietnam War, that foreign policy drama, both you and your husband, David Harris were arrested. I mean, you were about revolution.
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Right.
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You know, I came across, as I was getting ready for this, I came across this interview on CBS in 1965, which was like calmly hostile.
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Exactly.
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I mean, maybe that happened.
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They weren't supposed to notice it was hostile.
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They were, yeah. I mean, he was basically calling you seditious and treasonable in these very measured tones. And you were so young and you were actually quite calm back. You know, I remember he went, he wanted to talk to you about. He said something like, don't you believe what we believe in this country, that communism is a threat. Do you remember what you said?
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No.
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Yeah, you said, and you said again with great serenity, I think that bogeyman is not communism or any ism, it's hatred. Yeah. And you said I was clever once.
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You were.
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It was very impressive. You said, if you believe that men can change, then there's hope. You said, what is treasonable? Killing people is treasonable.
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Yeah, that was always very clear to me. The other thing that I got from Quaker meeting was the discussions about nonviolence, violence. From the time I was 8 on, I heard that discussion about what's really important in the world, the life of a person, turf land, what are we really fighting for? And that the human being should be the most important of all those things. And it's not how it works out at the moment.
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B
You've also written about and spoken about realizing later that you were kind of, I think you said, addicted to activism. And, you know, you talk about saving the world as a kind of double edged sword. And, you know, I think about that. I mean, I'm 20 years younger than You.
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But
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I do think that that
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that
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kind of call in the 20th century, in the mid to late 20th century, you know, that we were raised to save the world. That kind of did as much damage. I'm not saying that you did damage, but I think that that was a kind of a slippery slope.
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Well, I had the great good fortune of having the people around me knock some common sense into me periodically. And one of the things that was really important was to understand that we shall overcome didn't mean world peace forever. We shall overcome now if we can still think of it as small victories, we can overcome this and we can overcome that, because that's all we can do now. That's all we can do unless somehow or other there was another movement. And however the stars have to line up. So the music is right and the activism is right, and at the moment it isn't. We're all trying to find our way and how best be heard or make a dent or do something empathetic and decent that doesn't get lost in the abyss. So just encourage people to keep trying that the odds are just so enormously against us, which just means you just have to try a little bit harder. Yeah.
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B
And you also straddled this experience of fame. And I don't know, even when I read about you and you're called an icon and the queen of folk and a legend. I mean, that's stressful, right? You're on the COVID of time magazine in 1962. I mean, how old were you?
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20. I was 19 or 20.
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B
19 or 20. And you had this experience of being kind of torn between being an icon and being a mother. And I find some of the poems in here that are so moving are about this, Gabe, this kind of reckoning you've done internally and also a lot of healing that's taken place. And I wondered if you would read maybe the poem Gabe at three, which is page 49. And then there's another one, big sir, for Gabe at 24. And that's page 89.
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A
Okay. But first I have to read his contribution to this, which is I heard him say, or he said to me, and I wrote it down, age three. Mom, you know what I'm going to do sometime? I'm going to get a bucket and attach it to a string and fill the bucket with snow and hide there. And then when somebody comes along, I'll let go and the bucket drop on the head. Isn't that funny? Okay, but. Okay, this is called Gabe at three. I brought you here to this Banquet of life but neglected to give you a plate, a fork, a knife, the implements you would need in order to be. But there you are at 3. Small body, top heavy under immense headphones facing the picture window and the wild roses. The roses. And all of earth's beauty and all of earth's beauty within you as you listen dreamily to John Denver sing Take Me Home, Country Roads.
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B
And would you.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Well, say a little bit about your relationship to Gabe and the reflecting and the feeling that you did about that.
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A
Yeah, a couple things. First one is that lo and behold, he's 54, he made it. And we have an extraordinary relationship. And if we hit a snag, we get ourselves to a therapist really fast and we need to, you know, and that takes care of it. I kind of joke about when I talk to public. I say something about I didn't think I was a good enough mom and all these heads are going like that. I was going to start a Bad Mothers Club because there are so many people. I just wasn't there enough. I didn't do enough. And then when I was dealing with this stuff with my therapist and. And I could forgive everybody, you know, I could forgive this, forgive that, My mother, my father, but I couldn't forgive myself. And I went on about how I couldn't forgive myself. And he finally said, what makes you so special? Other people do this, you know, I don't know where that started about Gabe and guilt. Oh, yes. I just want to say that about Bad Mothers Club because we all go through it to one degree or another. It was, you know, it was tough because before I knew these splits in me, my behavior was dictated by unhappiness within me. And so I didn't understand it. I didn't understand why I'd throw an ashtray across the room. Why did I do that? Well, in the end, it's sort of almost as though somebody else in here had to do that to get it off our chest. And then I would get to know that person and we would discuss the ashtray that he just wrecked. But you can't say I didn't do that. Tommy did. Just doesn't work that way. Anyway, I don't know where we left
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B
off in the documentary. He speaks with great compassion, though, about that and about Gabe towards you.
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A
Gosh, yeah. I just am so grateful for the way he dealt with the questions and the kindness. He has all the kindness and compassion that I may not have like that. He's just made that way. He's a forgiving so I've had to work at it. I've had to work at it.
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B
So would you read Big Sur for Gabe at 24? It's page 89. 89?
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A
Yeah, big sir forgave at 24. Here is a cruel beauty. Here is a thunder and flying mist. Craggy granite beds of tiny wildflowers and mother of pearl tears glistening down the fierce cheeks of red clay ghosts. Hears the sound of wind like a forsaken witch sobbing along the Crow Fly Cliffs. Lost in the nether sky, defeated by the coast's brutal beauty. A pure white heron, the king of Castle Rock, preens above silhouettes of hunching brown herons lined up like nuns along the rocks and down to the raging sea. I thought I saw the reef of jade dancing in a renegade shaft of sunlight too. In chunks of broken rocks strewn like emeralds all along the sand. And then I saw my son, my only son. My red clay son. See? What are we? My soulmate son. As he was crouched birdlike, high atop a massive rock high above the deafening sea. And as I watched him prayerfully, he spread his arms and reached for the shaft of sunlight, then looked down and smiled at me. The smile of a thousand suns. Sun of heavens pierce the sky and shine upon my only boy who radiates like you today. My son's a thousand suns in one. And I am neither witch nor nun, nor hair in white nor blue nor brown. I am the mom, the only one. The mother of my only son. Thank you. Thank you.
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B
And you have a granddaughter now too.
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A
I do. I have a 20 year old granddaughter.
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B
20 year old.
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She's a singer, songwriter. And all of a sudden said, I think I want to go to law school. I said, okay, Entertainment law. She has all the genes that my son and I both missed.
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B
The practical genes or what.
- [38:46]
A
Well, first of all, she has the bubbling, cheerful, expressing joy that neither Gabe nor I have. She has it all. And she's bubbling bright, straight A's, goes to parties. I don't know how she does it all, I don't. But this last one, she said, I think I want to be a lawyer. I thought, oh my God, is there anything left for others?
- [39:12]
B
You know, I thought what you said a minute ago about we shall overcome and what that really means,
- [39:21]
A
that it
- [39:21]
B
is a bit at a time, that it's not some kind of dramatic resolution. I wonder. Also, you know, also just thinking about being a grandmother and, you know, something like the word peace, which was a big word in the 60s and I mean, it's an important Word at all times. But I wonder, I don't know what connotations does the call for peace have for you now that it maybe didn't then?
- [39:53]
A
Well, the problem with the word peace is that it's static. And the only way to even approach peace is through peace, through what you do. I remember my ex, David, saying, what you have at the end of the day is what you did that day. It doesn't really matter what you talk about. It is what you do. And so thinking we're somehow going to have peace by adding another day of bombing each other, it doesn't work that way. So that's. And I was never keen on the word peace.
- [40:28]
B
It was because for this reason, that it was too simple.
- [40:31]
A
China dropped bombs for peace over the Army. It's where, you know, or Marines or whatever, you know, we're for peace. Marines for peace. And. Doesn't make any sense at all. I think we want it to. You know, we have glorious ideas of what peace is. Obvious. Clearly it's not just the absence of war. But, hey, I'd settle for that right now. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:59]
B
You know, there's a lot of bird imagery in that gay but 24 poem.
- [41:05]
A
What's a bird imagery?
- [41:06]
B
A lot of bird imagery. And, you know, I do want to circle back to your reference a while ago about this backdrop, this underpinning of our time or our consciousness, our planet, of the planet itself being in such distress. And it seems to me that, of course, birds are a part of the natural world who sing.
- [41:31]
A
Yeah.
- [41:32]
B
And they're that family and what?
- [41:35]
A
They're my other family.
- [41:36]
B
They're your other family? Yeah. They seem emblematic for you of an emotional connection to the ecological crisis. They're very.
- [41:46]
A
And one of my practices that I work hard at because it's not easy, you know, and with the terror. The terror of global warming and is how do I deal with the birds which caused the most sadness in me? And years ago, there's a canyon below my house, and it used to be just a cacophony of bird song in the morning, starting at dawn. And I'd go down there, I'd make tapes of it with my little cassette recorder. And then a number of years ago, I went home. I thought, I'm going to go down, listen to the birds. And there weren't that many birds. And then more recently, there is nothing. There's an Eep and a peep, but that. I call them the hosannas in the book. So what do I do to be able to bear it? And I try to. We have lots of birds on the property because we. We also have rats and mice because I insist on filling the bird feeders. You know, this stuff all drops down and everybody's a heyday, you know, all the animals, but. So I try to listen to a bird sing and appreciate the beauty of the song and not wait for the chorus.
- [43:09]
B
Would you read your poem, Birdsong? It's on page 102.
- [43:18]
A
102, okay. Yeah. We used to sleep. We have two decks and we. I always sleep outside. I still do as much as I can, but. So I was on the deck. I lay out on the porch in the dark in my warm and rumpled sheets Awakened by the moon sliver casting glimmers on the hibiscus. It's time for the most beautiful music to begin. Heart awaiting every nerve listening. But by dawn's early light we heard it not. And my breath grew silent. But we heard it not. I was perched in a nightdress at the edge of the veranda in anticipation. But we heard it not. Yes, today was the day the bird song suddenly stops. Last year, it was on the 15th of June, so I'd hope I'd have more time. But when I could distinctly make out tree against tree on the mountain across the canyon, I knew it was true. There was no flood, no chorus. Only cheeps and peeps, chirps, squawks and eeps. But the ringing of hundreds of silver throats would not come again until spring. If they ever come at all. I told myself, it's nature. The birds have business or are tired. I held my breath. I can barely stand the inevitable turning of the seasons and the remnants and shadows of the hosannas that filled the canyon only yesterday. I think we should have one light one in here.
- [45:09]
B
Okay.
- [45:10]
A
This little piggy. Yeah.
- [45:11]
B
Okay.
- [45:12]
A
This little piggy played the violin. This little piggy played drums. This little piggy played sticks and bells. And this little piggy played none. The last little piggy ran and ran and ran all the way home, listening to the beautiful trio in his head. And he got so excited, he wet himself, which is where the wee, wee wee comes from. And soon thereafter, he taught himself to play piccolo and stay dry.
- [45:44]
B
Thank you. I wanted to just touch down before we close. Also, on this matter of living for a while in a body which is also called aging. I think that that ability to. Just. To find that kind of peace and to be still enough to commune with a tree is also something that gets easier as we get older.
- [46:15]
A
Yeah. We accept our Own looniness better. As we get older, we do these things more easily or more automatically. Yeah, but aging is a tricky business. It's, you know, there's the wondrous side of it, and then there's a side where I don't walk straight, and it's nothing I can do about it. I'm just not as coordinated as I was. And I go to physical therapists and say, I don't want to fall. What do I do? And so I work constantly to keep ahead of the game, the physical game. And I would encourage you to work faithfully because it doesn't help to go to the physical therapist and get a bunch of things to do and not do them. So, you know, nothing's going to happen unless you repeat this stuff mercilessly. Chase down your own health, I think.
- [47:13]
B
And in terms of, you know, you used the word wholeness a little while ago, that you've had this experience of becoming whole. I think in my life of conversation, I've interviewed a lot of people who, you know, lead wise and graceful lives. And a quality of that I have found is I think that our culture has this. We have this desire to resolve and fix and perfect. But actually, what I see in people who grow wiser and not just older, because the two don't necessarily go together, is this integration of everything that happens and everything that is learned and kind of the integration of what has gone wrong or what, what the wounds are into the wholeness that one achieves. And I feel like you kind of embody. You embody that too.
- [48:09]
A
Well, I wonder if, you know, integration is the word they used for all the inner people. You're supposed to all get together in a big clump. I always hated the word integration because I felt as though I was killing off one or two of them by trying to bunch everybody together. So. And the therapist said, well, no, we need to try everything to make it look interesting. Saying, no, no. Just look at your personalities as the chorus. And then you would be the diva. And I said, you know what? I still don't want. The only way I started letting these people go was one of them knocked on my head one day and said, I want out. I was so hurt.
- [48:54]
B
I was hurt.
- [48:55]
A
And so we began a process of, quote, letting people go so that I'm not, you know, hurting them. And they have. Sometimes they have their own lives.
- [49:06]
B
Where did they go?
- [49:07]
A
Well, it was an interesting one. They all went to different places. Some of them wanted to go into heaven and be with the founder of the opera because to us it didn't make any difference who he killed. He was just this guy, you know, he's magical guy. Some people wanted to go to the bottom of the ocean, some wanted to remain with other people from in there. But Yasha was a Jewish kid who was one of the best writers in the book. And I checked in recently, which I don't often do. So Yasha, whom I knew as a 12 year old, is now like 19 or 20, he's gay, he has his boyfriend with him and they have their school books together and they're going to an Ivy League school. So it happens they grow up.
- [49:59]
B
Actually, would you read another fun one? I think that you have, but also serious, given what you said about staying ahead of the physical game, is the low, low impact class poem would be page 107.
- [50:12]
A
I love that poem. I almost memorized it once, but not quite enough. Okay. And keep in mind this was written 40 years ago, so now it's a different story. Low, low impact class at the 6:00am Low low impact class in my local gym, the crepe skinned ladies with nets over their pin curls, slight humps on their backs, soft webs at the elbow bend and no bottoms to speak of, do the power walk, knee bends and surprisingly confident leg lifts to the pulsing beat of I Will Survive music thoughtfully chosen by the smiling 23 year old instructor whose skin is tight and lustrous and whose head is full of dry leaves, who chides. Come on ladies, come on ladies. And the old girls push on, stay the course and last a full hour. Afterwards they have a lovely steam bath and shower, dry off, powder their parts, then maneuver their bodies into street clothes. They take out pin curls and comb up, apply cheeks, lips and eyes, pack wet towels into fluorescent gym bags and with endorphin counts they would put their middle aged kids to shame, head Rosalie out to greet the rising winter sun. Thank you.
- [51:56]
B
So I know that this is a. A short list. You could make a much longer list and a more intimate list. But I just, you know, I think about this life you've lived and this span of time and you know, how hard it would have been to imagine that Diamonds and Rust would be on the UK charts in 2024, or that Bob Dylan would be a Nobel Prize winner and that you've stayed in a relationship with your parents and that you have this reconciled, loving relationship with your son. Yeah. And I just, you know, I think I want to. Before we close, I want to ask you to read the end of Goodbye to the Black and White Ball but first, I want to thank you on behalf of myself and all of us for your voice and for raising your voice in all the ways you shared it.
- [52:52]
A
Wait in the water Wait in the water, children Wait in the water God's gonna trouble the waters Wait in the water Wait in the water, children Wade in the water God's gonna trouble the water. Thank you. Oh,
- [53:37]
B
thank you so much for that. And let's hear a little bit of your poetic voice now to close.
- [53:43]
A
Okay, where was it?
- [53:46]
B
This is which one for my. Oh, Black and white bone. You read to diamonds. I pitched myself into a sea of memories and headed blindly like a hoodwinked shark for the marrow of the inner cormie. I pictured pustules of venom, but my therapist suggested it might be diamonds.
- [54:05]
A
For months I thrashed about, recording dreams, grasping for clues, fighting for the life of my son. When I came up for air from my flailing, I began to see shards of color. Slowly I began to see my life was sanctified, matchless, and I would trade it for no other. I should not have been shocked to find that a diamond was in fact the core of me. I continued to scrape off tenacious parasites. I discovered that sorrow is an ocean, fury is blue, pain is my companion. But love had not been smashed to bits so badly as to not be mendable. Like a gypsy violin crushed beneath a Nazi boot. I needed patience and an artisan. My therapists became my artisans. People around me unearthed the gems I'd been promised and held my heart in their cradling hands as I split up into a hundred pieces. A hundred bright souls sorting out their places in a dazzling necklace, taking in and reflecting sunlight, working to mend me, to help me survive my deliverance and transcend my survival. Thank you. Thanks, Krista.
- [55:45]
B
Joan Baez has released more than 30 albums across the last 60 years. Her book of poetry is when youn See My Mother Ask her to Dance. The documentary we mentioned about her and her family is is Joan Baez. I Am a Noise. Special thanks to Michael Green and the entire staff at the Chicago Humanities Festival and the Athenaeum center for Thought and Culture for bringing me together with Joan.
- [56:24]
A
The audience.
- [56:24]
B
The OnBeing project is Chris Heagle, Loren
- [56:27]
A
Drummerhausen, Eddie Gonzalez, Lucas Johnson, Zack Rose, Julie Seiple, Padre Go Thulma, Gautam Srikishan,
- [56:35]
B
Cameron Musar, Kayla Edwards, Tiffany Champion, Andrea Prevot and Carla Zinoni. On Being is an independent, nonprofit production of the On Being Project. We are located on Dakota Land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoe Keating. Our closing music was composed by Gautam Srikishan, and the last voice you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn. Our funding partners include the Hearthland Foundation Helping to build a more just, equitable and connected America, one creative act at a time. The Fetzer Institute Supporting a movement of organizations applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Find them@fetzer.org Kaliapea foundation dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on earth. Learn more@kaliopeia.org and the Osprey Foundation A catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives.
- [57:46]
A
On Being is produced by On Being Studios in Minneapolis, Minnesota.