From Krista:

Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears, is an exploration — with scientists and journalists and technologists and spiritual teachers — of what consciousness is, and is not, or might be: from the plants which have always fascinated him, to the new technologies which we are marveling at and fearing in equal measure. Do sentience, feeling, thought, or a sense of self amount to consciousness? Does it emerge from inside us? Or is it a force beyond us, in which we partake?

Before a rapt gathering in New York City, we explored where Michael has come on these questions and others. The word “mystery” kept landing the longer we spoke, and I brought some intriguing (and somewhat mysterious) conversations I’ve been having with Anthropic’s Claude briefly near the end.

I’m delighted to bring you into that room, with this episode.

You can listen to the episode wherever podcasts are found. Find an excellent transcript of this episode, edited by humans, on our show page.

From Krista:

One of our two special episodes has now landed, as promised, and the second — with Michael Pollan, on the mystery of consciousness, will follow next week.

This first was recorded on April 4 at Riverside Church, commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s speech “A Time to Break Silence.” It is often referred to as his “Beyond Vietnam” Speech. On the 59th anniversary of this speech, hundreds gathered again at Riverside for reflection, song, and a reading of portions of the speech. It was drafted by Dr. King’s friend and comrade Vincent Harding, a beloved former On Being guest, and many of his friends and family were in attendance with us.

None of the words of this speech is as famous as the sentence “I have a dream.” This speech altogether gives voice to the less remembered and heeded evolution of the vision of Dr. King and Vincent Harding and others. It invokes the work that endures beyond leaders and events of the day, and that can be neglected at our peril if too many of us too narrowly focus our imaginations and creativity and callings on what transfixes and demoralizes in the moment. It calls for a “revolution of values” in the face of glaring contrasts of poverty and wealth and the human cost of a world order that settles differences with wars. That our world is broken, it tells us, should come as no surprise. There were deep moral and spiritual underpinnings to the events of 59 years ago, which we did not acknowledge, much less have risen to as a nation.

What are the callings now, finally, for us to pick up in creating the world we want to inhabit in the beyond of this moment of great peril and an equal magnitude of possibility? I engage this conversation with two humans who loved Vincent Harding and were loved and formed by him.

You can listen to the episode wherever podcasts are found. Find an excellent transcript of this episode, edited by humans, on our show page.

Dear Friends,

For those of us in the western hemisphere, the air is growing soft and warm. And, I’m about to travel to the other side of the planet next week, to Australia, where the days are growing cooler. This knowing that my condition — superficial to deep — is not the condition of humanity everywhere is also a bedrock reality I am holding right now. I know you are holding it too. This time to be alive stretches us, in every dimension, between tenderness and tumult. I’m still writing, writing, writing, on my book, which is very much about how the quarter century of On Being wants to speak into this world we inhabit now, inviting us to be present to what wants to be born, even as we cultivate the quality of our presence to all that is breaking.

I hope I can start to share some of that writing with you in the months to come!

For now, I have other offerings. We just finished a five-episode season, as you know. But we have just decided to put two new shows into the podcast feed in coming weeks, created from new live events that feel very much of the moment. They could not be more different on some level. One is a conversation I had with Michelle Alexander and Lucas Johnson that took place at Riverside Church on the 49th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech “A Time to Break Silence.” It is often referred to as his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, and it was drafted for him by a beloved voice in the On Being archive, Vincent Harding. The other is a conversation I had this past Monday with Michael Pollan about consciousness.

What joins these two conversations, in my mind, is that they touch on central callings of our time that are civilizational and intimate at once: a season of war that compels us, as Dr. King and Vincent Harding believed Vietnam to do in its day, to examine longer-standing, deep-seated values and patterns that risk the very soul of our nation; and the frontier we are on, as our expanding understanding of ourselves and all of life converges with a technological revolution more mysterious and potentially more transformative than any in my lifetime — and perhaps in the history of our species.

Keep an eye out for emails as these shows hit the On Being podcast feed. I hope they might be good thought and heart companions for summer — or winter, whichever you are approaching — and send this with love, as always,

Krista

From Krista:

I’m on record bemoaning across the years that “love” is the most watered-down word in the English language. I know that invoking love feels very soft for our hard realms of politics and war. Yet it is an enduring truth that love is the only force as powerful in a human body as fear. And we inhabit a world that calls us to grow up our capacity to love — and to redeem our relationships to neighbors, strangers, and enemies — as never before, both in the present and for the sake of the world beyond this age of violence we’ve come to inhabit.

Rabbi Shai Held has written an epic theological work called Judaism is About Love. And, as he interrogates Judaism’s complicated history with love, he makes an offering that is of relevance to us all.

You can listen to the episode on our website or wherever podcasts are found.

Find an excellent transcript of this episode, edited by humans, on our show page.

Dear Friends,

We’re sending out this special edition of the Pause to let you know about an event at the historic Riverside Church in New York City in coming weeks.

On Saturday, April 4, I will be interviewing Michelle Alexander together with my longtime On Being colleague, teacher, and friend Lucas Johnson. Both of them were students of Vincent Harding, the singularly wise and delightful civil rights leader and elder. My conversation with him in 2011 became one of our most loved shows, and it holds wisdom that is with me again in these times. He led the Mennonite House in Atlanta and helped incubate the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence. He also helped write the speech Martin Luther King Jr. delivered which addressed the Vietnam War and the larger context of citizenship, the realities of war, and moral vision.

Vincent had an operating question that we circled around in our conversation: Is America possible? This is also the title of the event at Riverside, which will be held 59 years to the day of King’s original speech there. There are no tickets for this event, and there’s plenty of room. So if you are in the New York area, I warmly invite you to join us. It begins at 3 p.m. (doors open at 2:30 p.m.), with a dramatic reading of the speech by some surprise guests before our three-way conversation.

This event is sponsored in part by the historic Union Theological Seminary. I’m also happy to share that I am in residence at Union this year, serving as a kind of public theologian in residence and the Founding Fellow of a five-year project called Into the Crowd, which will connect beloved Christian leaders and visionary storytellers towards the healing of our world.

I’d draw your attention to the fact that Dr. King, in this speech, referenced two other beloved teachers from the On Being archive — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who taught at Jewish Theological Seminary across the street from Union, and the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I commend both of those episodes for relistening in this time too.

It would be wonderful to have you with us!

From Krista:

A few months ago, I was invited to sit with four people sharing a very different Israeli-Palestinian story than that which comes to us in headlines. They are members of the Parents Circle – Bereaved Families Forum, a very special community. It’s composed of hundreds of Palestinian and Israeli families, who despite having paid the highest price of the conflict between their peoples, choose to metabolize their loss as ground of shared suffering and possible reconciliation.

I’m so grateful to share that conversation with you now. You will hear their various stories of a transformation of perspective and path. You will hear me invoke a notion of “deep truth” from physics that is vividly with me in this time. Terrible ruptures and escalating violence are part of the truth of what we see ourselves capable. But they are not the whole truth, not the inevitable future. Courageous experiments in healing and transformation are also a reality of our time. In a packed room in New York City, I think we all felt like we were witnessing something unimaginable if you only judge the potentials of humanity from the extreme actions that shape what we call the news. The Bereaved Families Forum is extremism in a life-giving, heart-opening key. We left that room — and may you leave this listening — feeling a little bit healed ourselves, with a hopefulness become more magnetic and more reasonable.

This event was hosted by the American Friends of the Parents Circle – Bereaved Israelis and Palestinians for Peace (parentscirclefriends.org). My conversation partners were Robi Damelin, Arab Aramin, Mohamed Abu Jafar, and Liora Eilon. Liora, who lost her son in their kibbutz on October 7, 2023, is one of the newest members of this group. Learn much more about this beautiful community at theparentscircle.org.

You can listen to the episode wherever podcasts are found or watch on YouTube.

Find an excellent transcript of this episode, edited by humans, on our show page.

From Krista:

The word “trauma” is used so widely at present, arguably too widely. But it bespeaks a tenor of our shared reality. This episode is a journey inside what I’ve come to see as a parallel universe unfolding, where our species is unlocking knowledge about ourselves and capacities for radical healing of the most extreme trauma and distress. These findings are even giving rise to dramatic healing alliances across political and social lines that are inflamed in the culture at large.

At universities and research laboratories around the U.S. and the world, there are countless clinical studies, yielding results it’s hard not at times to call miraculous — for complex PTSD, long-term addiction, treatment-resistant depression. What I’m talking about are therapeutically-administered treatments with plant medicines and chemical compounds we call psychedelic or empathogenic.

Use those words, and many of us — including me until not that long ago — might become wary. Like all forces of great power, these can cut in every direction — the dark and the light of the human condition. But the conversation you are about to hear, with one of the leading neuroscientists in this field, revolves around serious, important research in settings designed for careful, beneficial human effect. Gül Dölen’s groundbreaking contribution to all of us is in her fascinating insight into what psychedelically-assisted therapies are revealing about the workings of the human brain and the brain’s capacity to change and the human capacity for major transformation altogether. The potential consequences of this science are intimate and civilizational at once. I see them as a stunning ray of hope in a struggling world.

You can listen to the episode wherever podcasts are found or on YouTube.

Find an excellent transcript of this episode, edited by humans, on our show page.

From Krista:

These days I sometimes have to remind myself to keep breathing. I think this is true of human beings across all of our differences and divides. But in a room in New York City just before the turn of this year, I was regrounded by this fierce and joyous conversation with Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith.

I invite you to settle into your soft breathing body with these two wise women as companions and with a sense of poetry as a technology, as Tracy describes in her new book: a technology for rising to our truest, highest selves, even amidst grief and mystery and danger, and bearing witness to each other as we do so.

I think all of us in the room left a little more lighthearted and alive as this conversation unfolded. I hope that will be your experience too.

You can listen to the episode wherever podcasts are found or watch on YouTube.

Find an excellent transcript of this episode, edited by humans, on our show page.

Five new On Being episodes will begin to roll out next week …

We begin with the delightful beloved poets (and friends) Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith in conversation together with Krista. We move on to the neuroscientist Gül Dölen; a community of Israelis and Palestinians who will expand your heart and moral imagination; philosopher rabbi Shai Held; and, because we can’t get enough of him, a wonderful new sit-down with Krista and Jason Reynolds on hope in this time and in friendship with the young in our world.

All of them offer beauty and pragmatic nourishment for ourselves and for witnessing each other’s hurt and each other’s promise. There is searching and pondering on what love really means and how it works and what hope can mean in this world in which hopelessness feels so reasonable. And be prepared to be amazed in an introduction to majestic learning underway about new, transformative healing of our brains and our lives emerging from the frontier of psychedelically-assisted therapeutic treatments.

Please help us spread the word, and join us!

You can also find us whererever podcasts are found. Find excellent transcripts of this trailer, edited by humans, on our show page.

In the World

You’re Invited:

New York City, Monday, April 13, 5:30 p.m. Krista will interview the one and only Michael Pollan about his thrilling new book on Consciousness, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, at The Living Room Bar & Lounge at the W New York - Union Square. Purchase tickets here.

New York City, Thursday, February 26, 7 p.m. Krista will host a Well-Being Concert, presented by Carnegie Hall, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Grammy Award-winning tenor Nicholas Phan will perform works by J. S. Bach and Buxtehude, joined by Theotokos, a renowned sacred ensemble, and the Cathedral’s timeless, healing acoustics. Purchase tickets here.

The long cumulative conversation that is On Being has taught me to see the world, and tell the story of our time, in this way: through an eye on what is unfolding in human psyches and bodies and spirits.

This way of seeing naturally surfaces truths that are not partisan, or don’t want to be. We are profoundly distressed, intimately and globally, at a nervous-system level — and this distress crosses every identity and dividing line. Opinion polls have their uses, I suppose. But they don’t unearth that, beneath whatever simplistic answer I give to a simplistic question, my heart is sore. Your heart is sore. We do not want to live in a world of rage and cruelty, one human being to another. We do not want to live in a world in which we scroll through videos of real people humiliated and dying at the hands of other real people, with these videos at our children’s fingertips too.

We can disagree on questions of rights and laws, and those questions have their place. But I’ll say it plain: whether a human being is a citizen or an immigrant, a neighbor or a stranger, does not have any bearing whatsoever on the moral and spiritual question of whether they are being treated with cruelty or humanity.

There is nothing abstract or mysterious about this notion of humanity I’m invoking. It is carried in the phrase of Abraham Lincoln that has rippled through history, because it names something fundamentally real and true: “the better angels of our nature.” I believe that the same images and meanings surface naturally, in almost all of us, when we hear those words. I also know — with my eye on the human drama underlying everything we call “political” — that it becomes more and more difficult to believe in these meanings and be true to them when a body, or a body politic, is living in fear. My lens on the human condition will not let me forget that human beings on the giving end of unfolding scenes of cruelty are themselves in a dehumanized condition. They too are distressed inside, living in fear. This is not an excuse for anything, but it is a piece of the reality before us that we must also take seriously.

At the very same time, this is one of those moments when the strange and beautiful reality of the human condition rises in the face of what would deny it. In Minnesota, where I raised my children and grew this On Being Project, a world of care and dignity one human being towards another has flourished within and around all the images coming to us of violence and protest and despair. There are churches converted to food banks. There are families accompanying other families and neighbors delivering meals and other essentials to individuals who feel vulnerable for multitudes of reasons. There are strangers bearing witness, non-violently, as homes are approached and doors beaten down. There are teachers and librarians and healers stepping up to care for children and teenagers who are traumatized by all of this. I am hearing a thousand stories that are not making the “news” as I’m trying to follow it, but they too are the story of our time, and they are stories of what makes us human and humane.

I repeat: I cannot believe that this beautiful strangeness and complexity reside on one side of our political lines and not the other. A few years ago, I penned a few lines in this newsletter that have become my credo:

Enough of us see that we have a world to remake.

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.

We’re asking, where to begin?

We have a long way to go to find our way back to feeling our belonging to each other that has never stopped being true. But it is what we are called to. I cleave to my faith that there are “enough of us” longing to meet this calling.

The common ground of our sore hearts may be the place to begin, and return, and ever begin again.

With love,

Krista

P.S. I’m excited to tell you that we will be rolling out a season of new On Being episodes that embody and embolden healing and reasonable hope and resilient joy. Keep an eye on your inbox in coming weeks for that.

P.P.S. Poetry Unbound is out with a new season NOW. And if you’re not yet subscribed to Pádraig’s wonderful, growing Substack newsletter, you can sign up here. In his latest writing, he shares a moving poem written from these weeks in Minneapolis.

In the World

You’re Invited:

New York City, Thursday, February 26, 7 p.m. Krista will host a Well-Being Concert, presented by Carnegie Hall, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Grammy Award-winning tenor Nicholas Phan will perform works by J. S. Bach and Buxtehude, joined by Theotokos, a renowned sacred ensemble, and the Cathedral’s timeless, healing acoustics. Purchase tickets here.

In these quiet days of a violent December, a single, simple sentence is coming back to me from the earliest days of On Being. It was a gift from the late wise physician Sherwin Nuland. He attributed it to Philo of Alexandria, but I also find it credited to Plato or the 19^th-century Scottish Reverend John Watson:

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

This sentence has stayed alive for centuries, because it tells an enduring truth each of us feels in our bones upon reading it. But it is far more than a gentle reminder in this world we inhabit. It is quiet intelligence with civilizational power. The news brings it home every day now with awful variation — the chaos and terror that a despairing human being can wreak.

On my bad days, I can almost grow nostalgic for the high geopolitical terrors of the Cold War world of my childhood and young adulthood. Then, we lived with the stark knowledge that nuclear missiles, hidden in the ground within striking distance of any one of us, could ascend at any moment with the push of a button. Now, it feels like our time and its technologies are weaponizing the inborn vulnerability and volatility of human beings.

This counsel of Philo (or Plato or Rev. Watson) becomes a way to anchor and stand more gracefully before this reality of our time. “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a great battle.” See what happens if you take this as a life practice through the ordinary encounters of your days. How do you internalize the news differently? How do you grieve the pain and celebrate the beauty of this world differently? That fathoms of struggle hide in you and in people you love is true too of every stranger, even those who vex and frighten. So is the fact that we and they are more than the sum of our struggles, and we are all capable of surprising ourselves, and of healing and changing, our whole lives long. Tenderness on the part of beloveds and strangers goes a long way to help.

I send this note with blessings to you for a tender, peaceful turn of the year. We are in production for a short, powerful season of new On Being episodes that will be published beginning in January. Stay tuned for more, and I’d love to encounter you at one of the events planned for the months ahead that are described below.

I offer this with love, as always,

Krista

In the World

You’re Invited:

Los Angeles, Sunday, January 11, 2 p.m. “In Search of Common Cause”: Krista will be in conversation with acclaimed Iranian-German thinker Navid Kermani on literature, politics, and spirituality in a polarized world. At the Los Angeles Public Library, in collaboration with the Thomas Mann House. Reserve a ticket here.

Brookline, MA, Wednesday, January 14, 7 p.m. Krista will be in conversation with novelist Nicole Krauss, hosted by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They’ll explore how music and literature offer redemptive paths through history, loss, and the search for meaning, taking inspiration from Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms”. Purchase tickets here.

New York City, Thursday, February 26, 7 p.m. Krista will host a Well-Being Concert, presented by Carnegie Hall, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Grammy Award-winning tenor Nicholas Phan will perform works by J. S. Bach and Buxtehude, joined by Theotokos, a renowned sacred ensemble, and the Cathedral’s timeless, healing acoustics. Purchase tickets here.

Listen:

Poetry Unbound is back! A new season is underway and will run through March. ICYMI: Padraig published two new books this year — 44 Poems On Being with Each Other and Kitchen Hymns. Find them on our Bookshop page, and subscribe to Pádraig’s newsletter, Poetry Unbound, to stay in touch with his reflections and adventures.

From Krista:

Across the years, I’ve heard many stories (that warm my heart) about long happy hours of cooking while listening to On Being. Now as much as ever, we need nourishment to keep body and soul together. So, on a meditation retreat this past week — when I was supposed to be focused on following my breath — I cooked up this playlist of delight and wisdom from across the archives for the feast and family days of the season ahead.

Listen Here. 

Blessings, and enjoy…

PS! The playlist includes beautiful, heart-opening conversations with Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo when they were each Poet Laureate. And ICYMI, I’ll be in a conversation with them together Dec. 4 at Symphony Space in New York City. I can’t wait. There are still a few tickets left here.

Dear Friends,

I write to you from Vermont. I have been reading Mary Oliver in the mornings while looking out a window at New England trees. They are blazing with beauty, before they shed their leaves for winter and nurture roots for the spring. I can’t help but wonder, as she often did, what they would say to us if they could — what they would teach us.

This past summer, on Cortes Island in British Columbia, I had the great honor of standing in a forest with Suzanne Simard. You may remember her revelatory conversation with me in 2021. She grew up in a family of foresters and loggers and eventually became a forest ecologist who has utterly shifted our understanding of trees and the vitality of the natural world. Modern forestry saw a forest, like a human group, as a collection of individuals. Simply put, it focused on what the human eye could see looking up and — at a less conscious level, perhaps — applied a logic of Western society. It assumed that trees compete with each other for light and soil. It routinely tore out mature trees to plant marketable, young species, alone and set apart.

On Cortes, Suzanne trained my vision and imagination down to the ground, where features of the natural world that we’re only now taking seriously are stitching the life of the forest and the life of the planet together: mycelia, fungi, mosses. It turns out that a forest is a single organism wired for reciprocity and mutuality. The oldest hub trees — which she calls Mother Trees — are incessantly sensing “who is rich and who is poor, who is healthy and who is sick.” They communicate, send warning signals, and deliver nutrients — you can hear this with a Geiger counter — by way of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and water and chemicals and hormones. One of Suzanne’s most astonishing findings is that these networks of communication and sustenance closely mirror what we’re now able to see in the neural networks of the human brain.

I’m letting all of this enliven my understanding of what it means to stay grounded and vital and whole in this time. For this too is the generative story of our time: We’re on dazzling, revolutionary territory of seeing the workings of vitality inside the body of the Earth and inside ourselves. We’re understanding that we’ve inhabited ecosystems while organizing the modern world around specialization, categorization, mechanization, and the individual. We’ve inhabited ecosystems, that is to say, while organizing around parts.

Even modern Western medicine grew up in love with specialization and became largely an art of treating our parts. But the ecosystem of our own bodies may be the most surprising new territory of all. Here, too, we’re seeing pathways and infrastructure that bring the whole into concert, for better and for worse, that we did not know how to take seriously before: vagus nerve, stress response, microbiome, fascia, interstitium. My body and yours are teeming at any given moment with more non-human than human cells, our well-being at all times dependent on all manner of bacteria. A new word in biology is “endosymbiosis,” describing a phenomenon found everywhere in nature in which the cells of one organism live and thrive inside the cells of another, to mutual benefit. The endosymbiotic microbiome in the gut of a human being regulates digestion, the absorption of nutrition, and the warding off of disease in communication with the brain and the whole of the body. Some are calling it a new “organ” of the body. Some are calling it “the second brain.” It may be, in ways we keep unlocking, the very epicenter of quality of health and of life.

Our life together too is endosymbiotic — or wants to be — which goes some way in explaining our communal dysregulation in a very different light than the one cast by politics and technology. You are a stranger to me. And: Our lives are in kinship. It is not just that my well-being and yours are at some very real level bound up together if we look closely enough at our economies and societies and ecologies. We may resist this knowledge and live in lonely and unhealthy defiance of it. Nevertheless, we are joined at all times by the substance of our beings — the energy and matter of our bodies, the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, and the mysterious stuff of consciousness itself — and this is as much common sense as high science.

“Do you think there is anything,” asked Mary Oliver, “not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?”

It might seem like a quiet, even too gentle, response to say that part of being a generative — and, as nature would teach us, regenerative — force in this time is to cleave to such a truth and live, as John Lewis counseled, “as if” this were already realized, doing what I can to make its common sense more visible to more people. The reality of vitality itself will not let me live according to the illusion that separation is our nature or that we are alone in our anguish and our desire to rise to a higher humanity and flourish together with others across every fault line and fracture that defines our life together now.

I hope that the whole archive of On Being and this newsletter and this community of kinship can be a place where you feel that as a possibility. We will produce a new season of On Being shows early in the new year, and I will keep sharing with you here what I am seeing and pondering. In the meantime, I continue to be out in the world with events – which is to say, with people in their bodies. We’ll have details to share soon about January happenings in Boston and Los Angeles. There are a two public events coming up shortly in New York City, to which you are warmly invited — one where I’ll be interviewed, the other a live taping of On Being. Details and ticket info are below. I’d be so happy to see you there.

With love,

Krista

P.S. The photo above was snapped this summer at Tanglewood, where I met Yo-Yo Ma in the old-fashioned flesh for the first time. He is a member of this far-flung On Being community and it was, as you can see, a lovely moment.

In the World

Attend:

New York City, Tuesday, November 11, 7:30 p.m. Krista will be interviewed by Rabbi David Ingber of the famous 92nd Street Y. They’ll explore listening as a form of presence, the evolution of public discourse, and the sacred possibilities of everyday life. Purchase Tickets Here.

New York City, Thursday, December 4, 7 p.m. On Being Live: Krista with Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Symphony Space. Two former Poet Laureates and beloved On Being guests, both with new books! Purchase Tickets Here

Listen:

Poetry Unbound Returns in December!

A new season is underway and is slated to launch in early December and run through the winter. ICYMI, Padraig published two new books this year — 44 Poems On Being with Each Other and Kitchen Hymns. Find them on our Bookshop page, and subscribe to Pádraig’s newsletter Poetry Unbound to stay in touch with his reflections and adventures.

Dear friends,

I have been away from The Pause for a couple of months, pushing forward a book that feels like the quarter-century of On Being speaking into this world we inhabit now.

And, as I was preparing to write to you, word came of Jane Goodall’s passing. A theme of my book is the possibility of wholeness — that we are a generation of our species that can and must learn to become whole human beings, with whole institutions, living in whole communities and societies. A deep calling of being alive now is to tend the quality of our presence in this breaking, hurting world to foreshadow and make the world we want to inhabit in the beyond of it.

Jane Goodall embodied this attentive way of being and living and growing. She held to a sense of time’s long working and aspired to the healing of whole ecosystems. With that perspective, she discerned and set to the immediate work to be done. She spent decades studying and ever better understanding her beloved chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park. She then began to realize, in her 60s, that her next calling was to generously meet the human realities, fears, and misunderstandings that, unattended, would keep Gombe’s long-term flourishing fragile. She spent her last decades of life on the road, often with young people. And so, my conversation with the great primatologist at the end of her life circled around her wisdom on the matter of what it means to be human.

I believe that this century and its advanced economies and technologies are circling us all around, finally, to reckon with the raw, original problem — and highest promise — of ourselves.

The beautiful array of humans that has gathered around On Being keeps my hope muscular — not in every moment, but again and again. I feel all of the wise and graceful lives I’ve met in conversation, on air and off, walking beside me in life and in writing.

I will share more about what is on my mind and heart here in the Pause in the months to come. For now, listen to Jane, take in her good and generous and discerning life, and know yourself accompanied across space and time.

With love,

Krista

Listen wherever podcasts are found, or on our show page.

This rich, gorgeous conversation will fill your soul. A Buddhist teacher, ecological philosopher, and Rilke translator, she taught and embodied a wild love for the world. What follows is the second and final conversation Krista had with Joanna, together with Joanna’s friend, psychologist and fellow Rilke translator Anita Barrows, in 2021. Joanna and Anita had just published a new translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. At the turn of the last tumultuous century, Rilke was prescient in realizing that the world as he’d known it was passing away. Joanna’s adventurous life and vision took shape in the crucibles of the history that then unfolded.

Relistening to her now is to experience a way of standing before the great, unfolding dramas of our time — ecological, political, intimate. We stand before the possibilities of what Joanna called “A Great Unraveling” or “A Great Turning” towards life-generating human society. All of this and so much more comes through in the riches of this life-giving conversation.

Listen wherever podcasts are found.

Dear Friends,

These last few months have been a time of both sustained reflection and a round of travel for me. First, I spent a month-long writing residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy working on my next book, which is now pouring out of me. I will forever be grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for this incredible gift of time, mental space, and care. I’m standing before the questions on my mind and heart, the questions I hear so many asking, about how to stay present inside ourselves and present to this world in its tumult and tenderness. How to orient our precious powers of attention and imagination to what, in the midst of all that is rupturing, is asking to be born. I am experiencing the last quarter century of conversation — with guests and with listeners — as the most exquisite companions and guides.

Then, I spent a bit over a month on the road — seeing friends and family and taking part in a few profoundly meaningful events: the Modern Elder Academy, created by Chip Conley; the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference of 8,000 people; and the Aspen Ideas Festival. We taped three live events in Aspen, which we’ll release at some point in the On Being podcast feed and/or The Pause: a panel on the future of religion; a conversation about the muscle of hope with Jason Reynolds (who you know is one of my favorite people on the planet); and a thrilling conversation with the neuroscientist Gül Dölen on what we are learning about the brain and about new forms and magnitudes of healing through psychedelically-assisted therapies.

As I was on the move, of course, our new season and the Hope Portal were rolling out. It’s been beautiful to me to read your notes about working through this alone and with others. Please keep them coming. One of my key callings in the time ahead is to be a good steward of the On Being archive of wisdom, and this is, as you know, a first kind of experiment.

And, as a special offering to Pause subscribers, I’m delighted now to share the link to the whole Hope Portal experience — all seven episodes, transcripts, and journal in one place. You’ll find it below. I’d be interested in any thoughts you have about refinements we could make to this experience and future offerings. There is also, below, a link to learn more about an event that Pádraig and I will co-lead next summer in one of my favorite places on planet Earth: the Scottish island of Iona.

It seems a bit too simple, in these days, to offer wishes for a lovely summer. As I look at the world through a lens on the human condition, I believe that the evolution of weather in the places we come from — the transformation of seasons and of the storms we knew how to stay safe in — is an underlying, unsettling aspect of life in this time that makes everything else feel more volatile too. Yet, as Ross Gay reminds us in the last session of the Hope Portal, we are called to know what we love and to cherish delight when and how we find it. Joy is fuel for resilience. It is a cornerstone of the world we want to inhabit. And so I hope and trust that summer possesses its undeniable joys for you.

I write this with blessings and with love, as always,

Krista

In the World

Listen and Attend

Welcome to the Hope Portal, a reflection/course experience curated by Krista and drawing upon her conversations with several visionary humans: adrienne maree brown, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Joy Harjo, Joanna Macy, and Ross Gay. Together, they extend rich and actionable invitations for a muscular, reality-based hope. They offer ways of seeing and living to lay our hands and our hearts, our imaginations and life force on the generative possibilities of life in this time. Access the website with the password: Wisdom

The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep, enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.

Join Krista and Pádraig in Scotland next summer — June 27–July 3, 2026 — for a week of discussion, reflection, arts, walks, and ideas on the beautiful island of Iona. Expect special musical guests, time for meals and new friendships, workshops in writing and art, and chances to explore Iona's extraordinary history, geology, and nearby islands.

Tickets will be made available at 9:30 a.m. ET on July 29, 2025. Please be advised that these retreats are always very popular and sell out quickly. Register here. For information on future events, sign up for the Iona alert list.

LISTEN: While teaching at the Modern Elder Academy, Krista was interviewed by founder and friend Chip Conley. It's a warm, fun, personal conversation about "midlife" expansively understood.

Ross Gay is a poet, community gardener, and teacher who brings another way of wisdom to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what delights us. And that we have to tend to that as fiercely as to what is broken and what we’re called to make better, what we’re called to make more just. Knowing what we love and knowing how to take delight are fuel even — and especially — in times of great challenge. This is something we can practice moment to moment, he teaches, through every ordinary day.

Journaling prompts for Session 7

Give your curiosity and your journaling during this week over to a practice of delight. As you move through your smallest interactions, look for moments/sightings/experiences that bring flashes of light into your day. Do you notice “unambiguously pleasant public physical interactions”? What is pleasant and sweet and tender?

Can you feel how attending to delight as seriously as hardship nourishes a reality-bending imagination and passion for justice and hope that is as joyful as it is fierce?

We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.

Or listen wherever podcasts are found.

Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.

Just beginning? Read our introduction for a possible way to organize your experience.

The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.

Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also former Poet Laureate of the United States.

From the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it “the whole of time.”

It is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She’s always known it — never lost it — and she beckons us to enter and relearn.

Journaling prompts for Session 6

Summon your 200-Year present. Take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and to the oldest person you remember holding you. Roughly calculate the year of their birth and the history that shaped their lifetime.

And who is the youngest person you have held in your arms most recently? Imagine a robust life for them — both the age and year to which they could live.

Try to inhabit this expanse of history that you have literally touched and been touched by. Can you feel in your body, in your imagination, a more spacious grasp of time itself and of possibility and agency? What difference might it make?

We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.

Or listen wherever podcasts are found.

Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.

Just beginning? Read our introduction for a possible way to organize your experience.

The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.

Our teacher and inspiration for this session is Joanna Macy. What she embodies is a wild love for the world and a fierce hope that rises irrepressible from that. And she carries and lives an important reminder to us that when we love, we will also know pain, and we will know grief that can feel too awful to bear. When we talk about the muscle of hope being reality-based, that means that it does not call us to be brimming with optimism where that is not warranted. What we’re called to do is stay present. And when you’re present, there will be grieving to do, but that this — strangely, interestingly, kind of miraculously — increases our capacity to love this world. And it unleashes intelligence and ingenuity to sustain that love across a lifetime, as Joanna Macy has.

Journaling prompts for Session 5

What is the love on the other side of your pain?

What is a loss you have perhaps not quite acknowledged?

The despair that you began to write about at the outset of this experience, the despair you may be feeling for the world today — what would it mean to stand reverently before your grief? Can you imagine what it would mean — to sit with what it would mean — to turn it into a mourning that brings you more deeply into the love that lies just on the other side of your pain?

We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.

Or listen wherever podcasts are found.

Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.

Just beginning? Read our introduction for a possible way to organize your experience.

The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.

If hope is to be defining and forceful in the world we have to remake ahead of us, we must also speak hope into being. Ocean Vuong is a fascinating and singular person. The sweep of his work is about bearing witness to the other side of violence and the possibility of joy while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness to the fullness of what has been carried and what has been survived. And he is wise about the violence of language that is habitually, culturally instinctive — and how changing that is key to shaping our very presence to others and to this world.

Journaling prompts for Session 4

As you move through these days, get really attentive in every moment to this world’s fluency in the language of violence — the vividness and omnipresence of words that engender fear and despair. Notice, and write down the easy metaphors of death and war that are used everywhere from the news to casual conversations to social media, about everything from relationships to politics to the weather. Notice the death and violence metaphors that come naturally in the way you speak.

What happens when you alter your language? What does it mean to take off the shoes of your voice?

We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.

Or listen wherever podcasts are found.

Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.

Just beginning? Read our introduction for a possible way to organize your experience.

The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.