A collection of podcasts, poetry, meditations and reflection for however you’re processing this moment. Created in March 2020. (Illustration by Jocelyn Tsaih)
The earthquake shakes you awake, and then that’s sort of the big spiritual question: How do you stay awake? … The other question is: Why has everything we’ve ever been told about human nature misled us about what happens in these moments?
Rebecca Solnit
In this “spiritual book club” edition of the show, Krista and musician/artist Devendra Banhart read favorite passages and discuss When Things Fall Apart, a small book of great beauty by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön. It’s a work — like all works of spiritual genius — that speaks from the nooks and crannies and depths of a particular tradition, while conveying truths about humanity writ large. Their conversation speaks with special force to what it means to be alive and looking for meaning right now.
Poetry Unbound
Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of the Poetry Unbound podcast, reads and reflects on Joy Harjo’s poem “Praise the Rain.” Echoing Rumi’s poem “The Guest House,” Harjo asks us to be present to this moment — the crazy or the sad, the beginning or the end — to greet it all with the powerful word: “Praise.”
September 10, 2020
A companion conversation to this week’s On Being episode — Krista catches up with Rev. angel Kyodo williams on how she’s keeping her fearlessness alive through pandemic and rupture.
In so many stories and fables that shape us, cold and snow, the closing in of the light — these have deep psychological, as much as physical, reality. This is “wintering,” as the English writer Katherine May illuminates in her beautiful, meditative book of that title — at once a season of the natural world, a respite our bodies require, and a state of mind. Krista first spoke with Katherine in midwinter 2020, and their conversation continues to offer a helpful container for our pandemic time: as one vast, extended, communal experience of wintering. As 2021 draws to a close — still with so much to metabolize and to carry, with an aching need for replenishment — Katherine May opens up exactly what so many have needed to hear, but haven’t known how to name.
As we reflect back on 2020 and look ahead, how do we keep walking forward, and even find renewal along the way? How can we hold to our sense of what is whole and true and undamaged even in the face of loss? Sharon Salzberg is one of the most esteemed meditation teachers in the world. She speaks with Krista about how to care for the world while also learning kindness towards ourselves.
Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, we return again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up his intelligence on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towards the transformed reality most of us long to inhabit.
“Feel yourself sitting here. Feel yourself surrounded by all these people. Feel yourself, I hope, happy and content.” Spend two minutes on a lovingkindness meditation with Spirit Rock teacher Sylvia Boorstein.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
© Wendell Berry. This poem is excerpted from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry and is reprinted with permission of the author and Counterpoint Press.
Watch a poetry film version of this on our YouTube channel.
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