onbeing.org · 17 hours ago

Robin Wall Kimmerer and Azita Ardakani Walton — to Bring Life Into a Trembling World | the on Being Project

At the New York Public Library, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer and writer Azita Ardakani Walton sat with Krista Tippett to explore what it means to carry life forward through uncertainty - a question Azita first encountered in her own body, as her mother gave birth to her in Iran during wartime, and again years later while longing for a child of her own. That longing became the origin of her children's book *Ocean of Stars*, which holds the scientific fact that we are made of star matter alongside the older, quieter knowledge that wonder is not naivety but a form of moral seriousness. "Children may be the last among us who still understand that a creation story is not a primitive explanation for what adults now know better," Azita writes. "It is a way of staying tender before the facts." What unfolds across this conversation is something larger than a discussion of books or ecology: it is a reckoning with the habits of separation - from the living world, from each other, from the oldest parts of ourselves - and a tender, grounded argument that re-membering our belonging is not sentiment but survival.