Podcast
On Being with Krista Tippett
Hosted by On Being Studios · EN
Wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive.
Spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry.
Conversations to live by.
With a 20-year archive featuring luminaries like Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Desmond Tutu, each episode brings a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett,
Learn more about the On Being Project’s work in the world at onbeing.org.
73episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Ross Gay — Hope Portal, Episode 7
Jul 10, 202500:10:19Summary readyRoss Gay is a poet, community gardener, and teacher who brings another way of wisdom to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what delights us. And that we have to tend to that as fiercely as to what is broken and what we’re called to make better, what we’re called to make more just. Knowing what we love and knowing how to take delight is fuel even — and especially — in times of great challenge. This is something we can practice moment to moment, he teaches, through every ordinary day.Journaling prompts for Session 7Give your curiosity and your journaling during this week over to a practice of delight. As you move through your smallest interactions, look for moments/sightings/experiences that bring flashes of light into your day. Do you notice “unambiguously pleasant public physical interactions”? What is pleasant and sweet and tender?Can you feel how attending to delight as seriously as hardship nourishes a reality-bending imagination and passion for justice and hope that is as joyful as it is fierce?We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.A Possible Way to Organize This ExperienceTake each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group.For example, you could:● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful.● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow.● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words.● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune.The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
SummaryJoy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6
Jul 3, 202500:17:09Summary readyOur teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also former Poet Laureate of the United States. From the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it “the whole of time.” It is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She’s always known it — never lost it — and she beckons us to enter and relearn.Journaling prompts for Session 6Summon your 200-Year present. Take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and to the oldest person you remember holding you. Roughly calculate the year of their birth and the history that shaped their lifetime.And who is the youngest person you have held in your arms most recently? Imagine a robust life for them — both the age and year to which they could live.Try to inhabit this expanse of history that you have literally touched and been touched by. Can you feel in your body, in your imagination, a more spacious grasp of time itself and of possibility and agency? What difference might it make?We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.A Possible Way to Organize This ExperienceTake each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group.For example, you could:● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful.● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow.● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words.● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune.The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
SummaryJoanna Macy — Hope Portal, Episode 5
Jun 26, 202500:12:03Summary readyOur teacher and inspiration for this session is Joanna Macy. What she embodies is a wild love for the world and a fierce hope that rises irrepressible from that. And she carries and lives an important reminder to us that when we love, we will also know pain, and we will know grief that can feel too awful to bear. When we talk about the muscle of hope being reality-based, that means that it does not call us to be brimming with optimism where that is not warranted. What we’re called to do is stay present. And when you’re present, there will be grieving to do, but that this — strangely, interestingly, kind of miraculously — increases our capacity to love this world. And it unleashes intelligence and ingenuity to sustain that love across a lifetime, as Joanna Macy has.Journaling prompts for Session 5What is the love on the other side of your pain?What is a loss you have perhaps not quite acknowledged?The despair that you began to write about at the outset of this experience, the despair you may be feeling for the world today — what would it mean to stand reverently before your grief? Can you imagine what it would mean — to sit with what it would mean — to turn it into a mourning that brings you more deeply into the love that lies just on the other side of your pain?We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.A Possible Way to Organize This ExperienceTake each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group.For example, you could:● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful.● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow.● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words.● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune.The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
SummaryOcean Vuong — Hope Portal, Episode 4
Jun 19, 202500:11:29Tap to summarizeIf hope is to be defining and forceful in the world we have to remake ahead of us, we must also speak hope into being. Ocean Vuong is a fascinating and singular person. The sweep of his work is about bearing witness to the other side of violence and the possibility of joy while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness to the fullness of what has been carried and what has been survived. And he is wise about the violence of language that is habitually, culturally instinctive — and how changing that is key to shaping our very presence to others and to this world.Journaling prompts for Session 4As you move through these days, get really attentive in every moment to this world’s fluency in the language of violence — the vividness and omnipresence of words that engender fear and despair. Notice, and write down the easy metaphors of death and war that are used everywhere from the news to casual conversations to social media, about everything from relationships to politics to the weather. Notice the death and violence metaphors that come naturally in the way you speak.What happens when you alter your language? What does it mean to take off the shoes of your voice?We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.A Possible Way to Organize This ExperienceTake each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group.For example, you could:● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful.● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow.● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words.● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune.The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →A New Season of On Being
Apr 10, 2025Summary readyOn Being is back on April 16, with a special season tethered in the persistent beauty and courage of what it can mean to be human — six conversations Krista has had out in the world in recent months, followed by an experimental, seven-week reflection/action experience— Hope, Imagination, and Remaking the World — to undertake with others in your life. From singer-songwriter Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) to Mohawk elder Katsi Cook to writer Jason Reynolds. Illuminating our lives of love and our lives with the news and our lives of prayer. Befriending across generations and taking in the trauma of the other. All together, an offering towards the questions we're living on every place on the spectrum of our life together: How do we stand with calm and agency and accompaniment before the gravity of this time. How do we keep body and soul together as we do so? Sign yourself and others up for our mailing list and monthly newsletter, The Pause, to be the first to know when each new episode drops.______The Pause — a monthly Saturday morning companion to all things On Being, with heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, event invitations, recommendations, and reflections from Krista all year round. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
SummaryRemembering Nikki Giovanni - ‘We Go Forward With a Sanity and a Love’
Dec 12, 202400:50:40Summary readyThe delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. Her words and her spirit feel, if anything, more necessary now. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She became a professor at Virginia Tech, where she called forth beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there — a precursor to violence that has become all too familiar in American life in the intervening years. And she was an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to all — at home in her body and in the world, even while she saw and exulted in the beyond of this tumultuous age of her lifetime.Nikki Giovanni was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Some of her best known collections from which the readings in this show were taken include Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Her final publications include Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose and A Library.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
SummaryJoan Baez — "This Gift of a Voice"
Nov 26, 202400:57:54Summary readyShe 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 abuse they had buried, even in memory, at great cost. She 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 in to what it means to sing and live the reality of “overcoming,” personal and civilizational.Krista spoke with Joan on stage at the 2024 Chicago Humanities Festival.Joan Baez published her first (wonderful) book of poetry at the age of 83: When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance. She was one of the leading artists of the 1960s folk revival, and brought her voice to the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of that decade. She performed for over 60 years, releasing more than 30 albums. She has won scores of awards and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. In addition to her poetry, she has published a book of drawings, Am I Pretty When I Fly?: An Album of Upside Down Drawings, and painted a series of portraits called Mischief Makers. You can find the links for her books here.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.______Sign up for The Pause — a monthly Saturday morning companion to all things On Being, with heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, event invitations, recommendations, and reflections from Krista all year round.
Summaryadrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life
Jul 3, 202401:20:13Summary readyThe wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of "pleasure activism" and "emergent strategy," is surely one of these. We're listening with new ears as she brings together so many of the threads that have recurred in this season of On Being: on looking the harsh complexity of this world full in the face while dancing with joy as life force and fuel, and on keeping clear eyes on the reasons for ecological despair while giving oneself over to a loving apprenticeship with the natural world as teacher and guide. A love of visionary science fiction also finds a robust place in her work and this conversation. She altogether shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking — the cultivation of old and new ways of seeing, towards a transformative wholeness of living.adrienne maree brown’s influential books include Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us, and Pleasure Activism. More recently, she has published Maroons, a work of speculative fiction, and she co-edited the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She also co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World. And, a special heads up: in late summer 2024, adrienne maree brown will publish a phenomenal new book — Loving Corrections.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.
Summary“The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón
Jun 28, 202400:01:43Summary readyAn impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's reading of her piece, “The End of Poetry” — and hear her read more of her work in the On Being episode, “To Be Made Whole.”Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent volume is The Hurting Kind. As poet laureate, she edited the collection You Are Here, part of her signature project focusing on how poetry can connect us to the natural world. She is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and an instructor in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.
SummaryAtul Gawande — On Mortality and Meaning
Jun 27, 202401:02:48Summary readyWe are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure — where care stops with a terminal diagnosis. Hospice has moved, from something rare to something expected. And yet advances in technology have made it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expense of the quality of this last time of life. Meanwhile, there is a new longevity industry which resists the very notion of decline, much less finitude. Fascinatingly, the simple question which transformed the surgeon Atul Gawande’s life and practice of medicine is this: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive. This conversation evokes both grief and hope, sadness at so many deaths — including our species-level losses to Covid — that have not allowed for this measure of care. Yet it also includes very actionable encouragement towards the agency that is there to claim in our mortal odysseys ahead.Atul Gawande's writing for The New Yorker and his books have been read by millions, most famously Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He currently serves as Assistant Administrator for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He previously practiced general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and was a professor at both Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in October 2017.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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