“Enough of us  — across all of our differences — see that we have a world to remake.
We want to orient towards that possibility.
We want to meet what is hard and hurting.
We want to rise to what is beautiful and life-giving.
We want to do that where we live, and we want to do it walking alongside others.”

Krista Tippett

The people who gather around On Being are part of the generative narrative of our time. In all kinds of lives, in all kinds of places, they are healers and social creatives. At human pace, they are enlivening the world that they can see and touch. In generational time, they are stitching relationship across rupture. They are honoring and recovering the fullness of the human experience — the life of the mind, the truth of the body, the wild mystery of the spirit, and our need for each other.

If you are here, you are likely already part of this. And if you’d like to know more, we suggest you start with our Foundations for Being Alive Now.

Our conversations create openings. In a political and cultural space that rewards certainty, ferments argument, and hastens closure, we nourish and resource the interplay between inner life, outer life, and life together. In this spirit, our ecosystem of offerings – launching across 2023 – serve a far-flung global web of listeners/practitioners.

• Studios: On Being and Poetry Unbound podcasts, The Pause Saturday newsletter, the Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter. And books, and more, to come.
• Gatherings: Convenings and “quiet conversations” to ignite and connect the generative landscape of our time.
• Lab for the Art of Living: Tools and resources — in service of and informed by our content and convenings — towards embodied wisdom and a life-giving imprint on the world around, breath to breath, and hour to hour. Wisdom practices and digital retreats coming in 2023: Hope Is a Muscle, Finding Replenishment, Metabolizing Compassion.

We elevate voices of wisdom and models of wise thinking, speaking, and living.

We speak the language of questions. We live the questions.

We honor poets and poetry as necessary companions in mustering words spacious and generous enough to reach across the mystery of ourselves and the mystery of each other.

We orient away from the closure of fear and towards the opening of curiosity.

We know joy to be a life-giving, resilience-making human birthright.

We meet longings for justice and healing by equipping for reflection, repair, and joy.

We practice moral imagination; we embrace paradoxical curiosity; we sit with conflict and complexity; we create openings instead of seeking answers or providing reductive simplicity.

We endeavor to make goodness and complexity riveting.

We believe healthy spiritual inquiry propels us outside the boundaries of the self, into the world.

We understand questions as technologies and virtues as social arts.

We nurture virtues that build muscle memory towards sustained new realities — including generous listening, embodied presence, and transformative relationship across backgrounds and lived experience.

We understand love as the most reliably transformative muscle of human wholeness, and we investigate the workings of love as public practice.

We envision a world that is more fluent in its own humanity — and thus able to rise to the great challenges and promise of this century.