Episode Overview

Episode: Joy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6
Podcast: On Being with Krista Tippett
Date: July 3, 2025

This episode offers a profound and poetic reflection on time, justice, ancestry, and hope with Joy Harjo, Muscogee Creek Nation member, musician, visual artist, and former U.S. Poet Laureate. Guided by host Krista Tippett, the conversation navigates history’s wounds and possibilities, the “whole of time,” and the power of imagination to sustain us during periods of reckoning and renewal. Through story, metaphor, and personal memory, Harjo reframes despair and reorients listeners toward a generational, interconnected hope.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Reimagining Time and History

• Historical Reckoning in Oklahoma: Tippett opens by acknowledging how her understanding of her own hometown's history has profoundly changed, reflecting the broader contemporary challenge of facing uncomfortable truths and unseen beauty in American history.
  • "Part of the rupture of our time, for many of us is revisiting history we thought we knew, seeing in a whole new light places we thought we inhabited." [00:06]
• The “Whole of Time”: Harjo introduces her (and her culture’s) understanding of time as cyclical, interconnected, vast—contrasting with Western notions of time as linear and compartmentalized.
  • "She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it the hole of time. W H O L E." [02:00]
  • Tippett draws connections to Einstein, spiritual traditions, and the “long arc of the moral universe.”

Justice Across Generations

• Seven Generations and Justice: Harjo shares how her elders instilled a faith in justice that may take generations to arrive, yet is inevitable—a belief as real to her as anything else.
  • "My elders always believed that there would be justice, though justice is sometimes seven generations away or even more, it is inevitable." [04:50 paraphrased]
• Centering Future Generations: Harjo grounds her hope in her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and ultimately the teaching that all children are “our children.”
  • “I have grandchildren, great grandchildren and children. And in the original teachings, we're told that they're all our children. I have to think of them, and they're the rudder of hope… I have to know that there is a larger, beautiful sense... the stories. Everything wind up at a point of harmony.” [05:45]

Experiencing and Invoking Nonlinear Time

• Different Kinds of Time: Harjo and Tippett discuss how human minds tend to be literal and linear, yet, other perspectives—like story, ceremony, and image—allow us to inhabit or glimpse time differently.
  • "There's another kind of perspective that you bring to understand or even move within time...like my grandson and I standing there watching this field...gave us that glimpse into even another kind of time." — Joy Harjo [07:20]
• Power of Image: The “whole earth” image from space shifted collective consciousness and offered a vast, interconnected perspective—a metaphor for this wider, more generous time.

Story and Song as Portals

• The Saxophone and Ancestral Memory: Harjo recounts the saxophone’s introduction to her tribe, how her grandmother played, and what the instrument represents.
  • "The saxophone is so human, its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy...But then you take a breath all the way from the center of the earth and blow. All that heartache is forgiven—all that love we humans carry makes a sweet deep sound and we fly a little." — Joy Harjo [09:30]
• Ceremony, Story Field, and Expansive Imagination: Tippett points to Harjo’s music and poetry as “ceremony” expanding the bounds of linear cultural imagination and inviting listeners to live within a larger “story matrix.”

Making Hope Spacious and Real

• Hope as Expansive Practice: Tippett invites listeners, guided by Harjo’s example, to “practice living in the whole of time”—to use imagination as a tool of survival, healing, and justice.
  • “To claim a hope that is big enough to meet them as they are… to fly a little in our perspective, to believe and to insist and to live as if time and space are on the side of deep justice.” [10:50]
• The 200-Year Present (Journaling Exercise):
  • Instructions: Trace back to the oldest hands that held you, then forward to the youngest you have held, calculating the span of years between their births and projected deaths—a “200-year present.”
  • Purpose: Cultivates an embodied awareness of one’s tangible place in time, spanning generations, activating agency and spaciousness.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On generational hope:
  "They're all our children. I have to think of them, and they're the rudder of hope... Everything wind up at a point of harmony. And when you wind up at that point, everything will be reckoned with." — Joy Harjo [05:45]
• On time and perception:
  "There's another kind of perspective that you bring to understand or even move within time that would give you that perspective." — Joy Harjo [06:40]
• On playing saxophone and healing:
  "All that heartache is forgiven, all that love we humans carry makes a sweet deep sound and we fly a little." — Joy Harjo [09:30]
• On hope and justice:
  "To believe and to insist and to live as if time and space are on the side of deep justice and human flourishing, in which we all become more whole." — Krista Tippett [10:50]

Important Timestamps

• 00:06 — Krista Tippett introduces Joy Harjo and frames the episode’s inquiry into history and time.
• 05:45 — Harjo speaks on intergenerational hope and her belief in justice across generations.
• 06:40 — Discussion of nonlinear, cyclical time and accessing broader perspectives.
• 09:14 — Harjo reads from An American Sunrise about the saxophone and ancestry.
• 10:50 — Tippett synthesizes Harjo’s teachings, articulating the call to claim a more expansive sense of time and hope.
• 12:40 — Journaling prompt: the “200-year present” exercise and why it matters.

Conclusion: Living in the Whole of Time

Through evocative storytelling and gentle wisdom, Joy Harjo models a way of holding history’s pain and possibility simultaneously, grounded in a sense of time connecting past, present, and future. Krista Tippett extends these insights into a practical reflection: by expanding our sense of time—even just through a thought exercise—we open ourselves to generational healing, agency, and hope robust enough to meet this tumultuous era.

Harjo’s presence, poetry, and music are invitations: to ground ourselves more deeply, to live more spaciously, to remember we are always part of a longer story—and to “fly a little."