Sometimes when your world changes, it seems like everything turns towards you, fresh, new, and curious.

We’re pleased to offer Joshua Bennett’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

How would you tell your own creation myth? Who — or what — would be in it?

We’re pleased to offer Abigail Chabitnoy’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what we’ve falsely compartmentalized as physical, emotional, mental, even spiritual. And so much of what we’re seeing brings us back to intelligence that has always been in the very words we use — “gut instinct,” for instance. It brings us back to something your grandmother was right about, for reasons she would never have imagined: you are what you eat. There is so much actionable knowledge in the tour of the ecosystem of our bodies that Kimberley Wilson takes us on this hour. This is science that invites us to nourish the brains we need, young and old, to live in this world.

In the face of wonder, we can sometimes lose ourselves.

We’re pleased to offer M. Soledad Caballero’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

Would you write a letter to a world leader? Do you think they’d listen? What would you say?

We’re pleased to offer Rafiq Kathwari’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

Few books have been more eagerly passed from hand to hand with delight in these last years than Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Krista interviewed her in 2015, and it quickly became a much-loved show as her voice was just rising in common life. Robin is a botanist and also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She’s written, “Science polishes the gift of seeing, Indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss — a bryologist — she describes mosses as the “coral reefs of the forest.” Robin Wall Kimmerer opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate.

Children’s demands can be high, and their standards can be exacting. It’s a good thing they’re loveable.

We’re pleased to offer Caroline Bird’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

What do we achieve in our fighting? How can we turn to hope and our deepest nature?

We’re pleased to offer Marilyn Nelson’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

A few years ago, Krista hosted an event in Detroit — a city in flux — on the theme of raising children. The conversation that resulted with the Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Sylvia Boorstein has been a companion to her and to many from that day forward. Here it is again as an offering for Mother’s Day — in a world still and again in flux, and where the matter of raising new human beings feels as complicated as ever before. Sylvia gifts us this teaching: that nurturing children’s inner lives can be woven into the fabric of our days — and that nurturing ourselves is also good for the children and everyone else in our lives.

Is something lost once it’s gone? How do we blend sadness with sweet memory?

We’re pleased to offer Richard Blanco’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

Is the light a comfort and the night disturbing? Yusef Komunyakaa explores the life and brilliance of what’s in shadow and darkness.

We’re pleased to offer Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a friend, teacher, and colleague to the work of On Being. But before that was true, Krista took a revelatory trip to meet him at his home in Northern Ireland, a place that has known sectarianism and violent fracture and has evolved, not to perfection, yet to new life and once unimaginable repair and relationship. Our whole world screams of fracture, more now than when Krista sat with Pádraig in 2016. This conversation is a gentle, welcoming landing for pondering and befriending hard realities we are given. As the global educator Karen Murphy, another friend of On Being and of Pádraig, once said to Krista: “Let’s have the humility and the generosity to step back and learn from these places that have had the courage to look at themselves and look at where they’ve been and try to forge a new path with something that resembles ‘together’ … Right now we should be taking these stories and these examples and these places and filling our pockets and our lungs and our hearts and our minds with them and learning deeply.” And that’s what this hour with Pádraig invites.

A poem inviting us to discover our brilliance and our nothingness. Both true. Both vital.

We’re pleased to offer Hannah Emerson’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

A song of praise to the crop-top from a crop-top-wearing man who encounters comments in public and sings and swings.

We’re pleased to offer Kyle Carrero Lopez’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

The visionary, next-generation organizer Ai-jen Poo says this of Tarana Burke: “There are just so many layers of hope that she brings to the world and to people like me, to survivors, to all kinds of communities.” Ai-jen and Tarana are the conversation partners for this episode of The Future of Hope. And what a conversation it is. We listen in on a brilliant friendship that has powered and sustained two extraordinary women who are leading defining movements of this generation that call us to our highest humanity. Ai-jen spoke with Krista in 2020 for our episode, “This Is Our (Caring) Revolution,” and is back as host for this conversation. She has been long ahead of a cultural curve we are all on now — of seeing the urgent calling to update and transform not just how we value the caregiving workforce of millions, but how we value care itself as a society. Tarana founded the ‘me too.’ Movement. What you are about to hear is intimate, revelatory, and rooted in trust and care. It’s also an invitation to all of us, to imagine and build a more graceful way to remake the world.

A seven-year poem: from the start of the process to bring a mother to live in the US to the time she walks through the gate.

We’re pleased to offer Divya Victor’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

We carry memory in our body: memories of our own selves, but memories of our forebears, too — talking with them as we walk, learning from them as they inquire.

We’re pleased to offer Denise Low’s poem, and invite you to sign up here for the latest from Poetry Unbound.

You probably know the outline of the Exodus story and its main characters: Moses, the Pharaoh, the burning bush, the plagues, the parting of the sea. And, in another realm of the power of story, the words “let my people go” and the arc of liberation from slavery have inspired people in crisis and catharsis across time and cultures. Call it “myth” if you will — as the Greek Statesman Solon said, myth is not something that never happened. It’s something that happens over and over and over again. Avivah Zornberg walks us through the Exodus story that is relived in the Jewish Passover and resonates through Easter. She is a modern-day master of midrash — the ancient Jewish art of inquiry for discovering the deepest of meaning in and between the biblical lines. What can look simple on the surface, as she reveals, is a cargo of hidden stories that tell the messy, strange, redemptive truth of us as we are and life as it is. Krista and Avivah Zornberg had this lovely, intimate conversation in the early days of this show, in 2005.