The On Being Project

The wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called “live human signposts” — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of “pleasure activism” and “emergent strategy,” is surely one of these. We’re listening with new ears as she brings together so many of the threads that have recurred in this season of On Being: on looking the harsh complexity of this world full in the face while dancing with joy as life force and fuel and on keeping clear eyes on the reasons for ecological despair while giving oneself over to a loving apprenticeship with the natural world as teacher and guide. A love of visionary science fiction also finds a robust place in her work and this conversation. She altogether shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking — the cultivation of old and new ways of seeing, towards a transformative wholeness of living.

We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure –– where care stops with a terminal diagnosis. Hospice has moved, from something rare to something expected. And yet advances in technology have made it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expense of the quality of this last time of life. Meanwhile, there is a new longevity industry which resists the very notion of decline, much less finitude. Fascinatingly, the simple question which transformed the surgeon Atul Gawande’s life and practice of medicine is this: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive. This conversation evokes both grief and hope, sadness at so many deaths — including our species-level losses to Covid — that have not allowed for this measure of care. Yet it also includes very actionable encouragement towards the agency that is there to claim in our mortal odysseys ahead.

We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, writer Luis Alberto Urrea says in this week’s On Being episode, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, refreshing companion into the deep meaning and the problem of borders — what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us. The Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could be when Luis was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. Today, as part of his work as an author and educator, he regularly speaks to migrant children. He says, “I deal with so many kids who can’t tell their story, and they don’t think anybody loves them. They think nobody cares. They think everybody hates them. They’re waiting to be thrown out of the country or their mothers to vanish. So part of it is talking to people who need to say it more. Part of it is talking to myself, to say, “Don’t be a coward. Tell people you love them.” And part of it is, I’m often talking to 600 kids, not you adults, and I tell them, “I love you. I love you all,” because somebody’s got to. You’ve got to — if I could have a radio show, I would just read them a story every night and tell them I love them." Listen to his conversation with Krista now, wherever you listen to podcasts. Luis Alberto Urrea is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois Chicago. His books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction include Into the Beautiful North, The Devil’s Highway, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and Goodnight, Irene.

In our world of so much suffering, it can feel hard or wrong to invoke the word “joy.” Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying cries in almost every life-giving conversation that Krista has had across recent months and years, even and especially with people on the front lines of humanity’s struggles. Ross Gay helps illuminate this paradox and turn it into a muscle. We are good at fighting, as he puts it, and not as good at holding in our imaginations what is to be adored and preserved and exalted — advocating for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. But without this, he says, we cannot speak meaningfully even about our longings for a more just world, a more whole existence for all. To understand that we are all suffering — and so to practice tenderness and mercy — is a quality of what Ross calls “adult joy.” Starting with his cherished essay collection The Book of Delights, he began to accompany many in an everyday spiritual discipline of practicing delight and cultivating joy. Listen now.

In this all-new episode, Krista engages biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus (Co-Founder Biomimicry Institute & Biomimicry 3.8) in a second, urgent conversation, alongside creative biomimicry practitioner Azita Ardakani Walton. Together they trace precise guidance and applied wisdom from the natural world for the civilizational callings before us now. What does nature have to teach us about healing from trauma? And how might those of us aspiring to good and generative lives start to function like an ecosystem rather than a collection of separate, siloed projects? We are in kinship. How to make that real — and in making it real, make it more of an offering to the whole wide world? Krista, Azita, and Janine spoke at the January 2024 gathering of visionaries, activists, and creatives where Krista also drew out Lyndsey Stonebridge and Lucas Johnson for the recent episode on Hannah Arendt. We’re excited to bring you back into that room. Listen now.

The years of pandemic and lockdown are still working powerfully on us from the inside. But we have trouble acknowledging this, much less metabolizing it. This conversation with Christine (Tina) Runyan, PhD, ABPP (Tend Health), which took place in the dark middle of those years, helps make sense of our present of still-unfolding epidemic distress — as individuals, as communities, as a species. She has cultivated a reverence for the human nervous system. She tells truths about our bodies that western medicine itself is only fitfully learning to see. This quiet conversation is not just revelatory, but healing and calming. It holds startling prescience about some of what we’re navigating now. And it offers self-compassion and simple strategies for finding ease within ourselves — and with each other — as we live forward from here. Listen now.

It’s so rare that we get a chance to capture lightning in a bottle, but that’s what happened when we recorded former On Being guest J. Drew Lanham at a live event in January: in a heart-stirring performance, he adapted the title poem of his wonderful new collection, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves (Hub City Writers Project). Enjoy it, and be sure also to listen to “Pathfinding Through the Improbable,” his full 2022 conversation — complete with poetry and birdsong — with Krista. J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature and the collection of poetry and meditations, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts.

“Loneliness is the bully that coerces us into giving up on democracy.” ⁠ ⁠ That stunning sentence was written by Lyndsey Stonebridge, our guest this week, channeling the 20th-century political thinker and journalist Hannah Arendt. Krista interviewed Lyndsey in 2017, after Arendt’s classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, became a belated bestseller; now Lyndsey has published a wonderful, elevating, helpful book offering her and Arendt’s prescient wisdom for this time. We have, in Lyndsey’s phrase, “un-homed” ourselves, and yet we are always defined by our capacity to give birth to something new — and so to partake again and again in the deepest meaning of freedom.⁠ ⁠ Lyndsey Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., and her new book is We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience.

In this concluding episode of “Poems as Teachers,” our special miniseries on conflict and the human condition, host Pádraig Ó Tuama says the poems discussed in this offering are a different kind of teacher: “not as teachers that give us rules to follow — more so teachers that share something of their own intuition.” And for a final reflection, he offers Kai Cheng Thom’s “trauma is not sacred,” which speaks directly, fiercely, and lovingly to the pain, scars, and violence that we humans carry and inflict upon one another. Listen now.

Being right may feel good, but what human price do we pay for this feeling of rightness? Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The Place Where We Are Right,” translated by Stephen Mitchell, asks us to answer this question, consider how doubt and love might expand and enrich our perspective, and reflect upon the buried and not-so-buried ruins of past conflicts, arguments, and wounds that still call for our attention. Listen to the latest from Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama.