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On Being with Krista Tippett

Our flagship show — conversations about the big questions of meaning, since 2003.

Poetry Unbound

Immerse yourself in a single poem, guided by Pádraig Ó Tuama.

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Wisdom Practice

June 21, 2023

Taking a Long View of Time
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As we participate in the magnitude of change that is upon us, a long reality-based understanding of time — and of how change actually happens — can replenish our sense of ourselves and the world.

 

Question to Live

How am I, or can I be, critical yeast in the world that I can see and touch?

 

Integration Step

Map your 200-Year Present

Map your 200-year present. Feel that in your imagination, and in your body.

 

Heart of the Matter

Geological time, deep time, cosmic time, evolutionary time — all of those are interestingly akin to a religious, prophetic imagination: the long arc of the moral universe that Martin Luther King Jr. invoked. This is a way to speak of this young century we inhabit, this post-2020 world: we are in a Kairos moment as a species.

The beautiful and mysterious thing in all of this way of thinking and imagining, this way of cracking time open and seeing its true, manifold nature, is that this actually expands our sense of the possible in the here and the now. It sends us to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always the materials even of change at a cosmic or a societal level.

This is echoed in many teachers and gifts of practice and of language: “evolutionary clusters”; “live human signposts”; the “quiet before”; “fractal emergence”; and “critical yeast.”

You might have to live the question of how to figure out what it means to be critical yeast in your world of friendship, neighborliness, work, community.

It’s waiting for you already in some part of the world you can see and touch.

The adventure is to make it more conscious.

 

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Wisdom Practice

June 21, 2023

What Sustains Us

With Drew Lanham

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“I have to find those moments daily. It’s a struggle sometimes, to endure all of this stuff and to say, ‘Ah, there it is.’ Sometimes we have to recognize the joy that the world didn’t give us and the world can’t take away, in the midst of the world taking away what it can.”

 

Question to Live

What is joy for me? (Don’t overlook what is “common.”)

 

Integration Step

Seize opportunities in the course of your day to notice, and protect, the common, particular joys that sustain you — to say, “Oh, there it is.” And journal about what happens.

 

Heart of the Matter

It’s hard not to be inspired by Drew Lanham. It seems he’s in such a constant state of discovery, no matter how much he knows and learns. He so fully enters that backyard world of birds that gives him joy — the sound of it, the intricacy of it.

You might treat this session as an invitation to take in the natural world in the days to come — to see it very actively as a contemplative space, and being present to it as a life-giving practice.

But the underlying invitation here is to ponder what that joy is for you that the world cannot touch, cannot take away. Contemplate that and dwell with it and work with that awareness. Treasure it. Turn it into a practice that you protect and “hoard” as Drew says — finding those moments daily. And look for those moments in what is common, examining how seeing them as “common” may diminish their deep, abiding significance and nourishment.

 

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Wisdom Practice

June 21, 2023

Saying Hello to What Is

With Pádraig Ó Tuama

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“So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars.”

 

Question to Live

What is prayer? Answer the question through the story of your life.

 

Integration Step

As you move through this week, and in your journaling, say “hello” to the day, to experiences, to memories, to grief, to hope, in a spirit of curiosity and tenderness and honesty.

 

Heart of the Matter

The invitation here is to explore the contemplative practice that is prayer, this deep spiritual and human impulse and ritual. Maybe for you this is a familiar, lifelong practice. Even if it is, give yourself a time of discovery. And as a beginning, a starting point, ponder in your journal: answer the question of what prayer is through the story of your life. What is the mother tongue and the spiritual homeland of prayer as you know it, as you’ve experienced it, if it is part of your experience, part of your culture that formed you?

Part of the impulse to pray often has to do with need, and is sometimes very present in moments of crisis, urgency, and immediacy. This is honored in prayer in a distinctive way. And the recognition of need is something that brings us to a deep, common language about what it means to be human.

This is also about awakening spiritual imagination. Not making things up, but really cultivating this intellectual, intuitive, creative, ritual orientation towards the formation in ourselves of courage and generosity and love, this inner/outer move that is always interwoven in spiritual life that is meaningful and worth pursuing.

 

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June 21, 2023

Let Joy Revive You

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
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June 21, 2023

Experiment with Prayer

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
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Delve

June 21, 2023

“So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars”

Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson with Krista Tippett
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Find Krista’s entire conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama at Corrymeela discussed in the Wisdom Practice.

This is an excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Pádraig Ó Tuama, Marilyn Nelson, and Krista. Find this full conversation here.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is the host of On Being’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Previously, he was community leader of Corrymeela, Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization. His books include a prayer book, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community, a book of poetry, Sorry For Your Troubles, and a poetic memoir, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World.

Marilyn Nelson is professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, and Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. She is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal “for distinguished lifetime achievement,” and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize. She is a writer for all ages: her books of poetry for adults include The Meeting House and Faster Than Light; for children, Papa’s Free Day Party; and for young adults, A Wreath For Emmett Till and the forthcoming Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor’s Life.

 

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Delve

June 21, 2023

“I worship every bird that I see”

Drew Lanham with Krista Tippett
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An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Drew Lanham and Krista. Find the full conversation here.

J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. He’s the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature and a forthcoming collection of poetry and meditations, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts.

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Wisdom Practice

June 21, 2023

History Is Like the Weather

With Rebecca Solnit
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“Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future.”

Question to Live

The earthquake has shaken me awake. How to stay awake?

 

Integration Step

Start to articulate the hopeful story of our time that you can see and tell from where you sit — that the world doesn’t yet know how to see and to tell.

 

Heart of the Matter

In another place in the conversation I had with Rebecca, she made that same case pointedly, in terms of how we don’t know what will happen or what the results will be of our own action. And this is such a wonderful and freeing thing to be able to take in every once in a while. You know, she said — she was quoting from Foucault, and she said this is not an exact quote. But here’s the thought: “We know what we do. We know why we do it. But we don’t know what [what] we do does.” We control our intentions, to some extent. We control our behavior. But we don’t control what that sets off in the world.

The other piece of what she’s saying that feels so resonant to me for us now is this notion that the earthquake shakes you awake, and then the question to live — how do you stay awake? Here we are, this now post-pandemic generation. Everything that we thought we knew for sure, so much of that was upended. We were called to so many questions and to learn edifying and deepening things about ourselves and others and the world. How do we stay faithful to those questions and to that learning?

I spent my 20s in divided Berlin, and the fall of Berlin’s wall in 1989 was utterly unimaginable, not just to me, not just to everyone I knew, but to everyone in that part of the world. The chancellor of West Germany was out of the country the day the Berlin Wall fell. And that experience that I had so directly, that there is always more to reality than we can see and more change possible than we can begin to imagine, this has formed me. I never expected in my lifetime to experience another turning like the one we’re in now, where the remaking of the world is truly upon us.

 

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Delve

June 20, 2023

The Ingredients of Social Courage

America Ferrera and John Paul Lederach with Krista Tippett
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An excerpt of Krista’s in-depth conversation with America and John Paul.

Earlier in this session, you heard from Agustín Fuentes. Agustín Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. He’s authored or edited more than 20 books, most recently Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being.

Learn more about Agustín and find the whole produced show of Krista’s conversation here.

America Ferrera is an Emmy Award-winning actor and producer. She’s known for the movies Real Women Have Curves and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and for the TV series Ugly Betty. She also stars in and co-produces the current NBC series Superstore. She’s the co-founder of Harness, a grassroots organization for social healing.

John Paul Lederach is a senior fellow at Humanity United and professor emeritus of international peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame. He is also the co-founder and first director of the Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. In 2019 he won the Niwano Peace Foundation Peace Prize.

Learn more about America, John Paul, and their work, and find the whole produced show here.

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June 20, 2023

Think Accompaniment

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
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June 20, 2023

Practice “yes, and…” Living

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
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Pause

June 20, 2023

Practice Radical Amazement

Guided by Krista, inspired by Abraham Joshua Heschel
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
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Pause

June 20, 2023

Stay Awake

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.

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Pause

June 20, 2023

Move from Spectator to Witness

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
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Pause

June 20, 2023

Making Wholeness Vivid

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
< Back to Retreat

Pause

June 20, 2023

Be Critical Yeast

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
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Pause

June 20, 2023

Pondering Rilke

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
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Pause

June 20, 2023

Taking In The Good

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.
 
< Back to Retreat

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