Wisdom, Solace, and Courage for 2024
Original Air Date
May 2, 2024
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.
To be present to the suffering and sorrow of this world from a place of love.
To accompany each other in this — and accompany the young.
To honor the fragility of being human.
To keep our capacity for joy alive as a human birthright — and as fuel for resilience.
To grasp the relationship between violence and power.
To listen to our bodies, and metabolize the distress of our collective nervous system.
To practice the power of imagination and create new worlds and new ways of living.
To take the natural world as teacher and guide as we stand before the species-level shifts we’re called to.
To nurture hearts “capacious enough” for the complexities and mysteries of ourselves and each other.
Join us.
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Transcript
Krista Tippett: Hello dear people, it’s Krista — with the news that On Being is coming back next week.
We are going to give you a special, two-month season. We have dug deep in our archive and pulled out classic, enduring conversations that hold wisdom and solace for a tumultuous now. We are producing them anew, we’re pulling in more, with these questions in mind: How to stay grounded — be at home inside ourselves — and keep courage, hope, and imagination alive?
We’re going to start with Kate DiCamillo, with her wisdom on how to think about and speak with children, the young people in our lives, about how light and peril coexist in human life. She also speaks to the eight-year-old that is always there — yearning, fearful and hopeful at the same time, in each of us.
We’re going to go back to Ross Gay, to Luis Alberto Urrea, to adrienne maree brown.
We are going to ponder what the pandemic did to our nervous systems, that is still nowhere near metabolized in us. And also find a way to ponder our dysregulated collective, global nervous system — how to stand with greater presence with some kind of equanimity before that.
We also have two big new conversations for you — one about what the natural world has to teach us about living with trauma, about accompanying each other in making the world anew, which we all feel called to right now. And, a conversation channeling the great Hannah Arendt, a prescient 20th-century political thinker newly echoing in this young century of ours. We are going to take in her wisdom about the human condition — which is so on the loose — though her genius that is better known is her analysis of totalitarianism and evil. But who of us remembers that she also identified loneliness, individual isolation, as the bully that coerces us into giving up on democracy?
Finally, as if that were not enough, we are going to roll out a special Poetry Unbound mini-season at the very same time — Pádraig bringing poems that become teachers on conflict and the human condition
Heads up: While we are off air, we are planning live events around the country for 2025, and this season ahead is going to lay some groundwork for that.
So again, the season starts next week: Thursday, May 9.
Tell your friends and family. Mark your calendars.
As they say, I will see you there.
Reflections