fear can provoke more fear. In part, this may be why the Hebrew deity is conceived as eternally present,2 which is undoubtedly too tall an order for any human being to attain.  Whenever we become distant from ourselves and from the world, a direct, open, and unmediated experience of being alive can be a welcome gift.  image by W.carter, Wikimedia Commons One way to reconnect with ourselves and become more present is to listen. We can listen to ourselves, and to life. A good place to listen is in the natural world.  In our original experience of the natural world, life abounds everywhere: in Death Valley and Antarctica, as well as a cabin in the woods.&n... posted on Oct 26 2020 (5,887 reads)

and I actually refer to you as the Gratitude Lady when you’re not around. And the reason is, you write me so many beautiful notes of gratitude, and I’m sure you must have hundreds and hundreds of people on a list that you write such birthday notes and thanksgiving notes to. And I just want to know, first of all, how do you do it? How did you become the Gratitude Lady? Angeles Arrien: [Laughs] I don’t know how I became the Gratitude Lady, but I just feel so blessed in my life that it’s increased my own generosity of spirit, of excitement, and gratefulness about what has been extended to me. And certainly you’ve extended to me so many wonderful opportunitie... posted on Sep 17 2012 (29,928 reads)

TIPPETT, HOST: Mary Oliver is one of our greatest living poets, beloved and often quoted by people across ages and backgrounds. She rarely gives interviews or speaks about the life behind her writing. But she's with us, this hour. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating] MARY OLIVER: "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things." Lord knows when I started writing poetry, it was rotten. MS. TIPPETT: The poetry was rotten? MS. OLIVER: Sure. I was 10, 11, 12 years old, but I... posted on Mar 18 2015 (28,298 reads)

the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, and he’s an assistant clinical professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco. A self-described “suburban boy,” he moved all over the U.S. growing up with his family until he attended Princeton. And there, the accident that nearly killed him set him on a path to medicine, but first to studying art. MS. TIPPETT: Design is such an important word for you and such an important notion that I feel runs through all your life and your work, and, to me, there is a spiritual aspect of that, expansively defined. And I’m just curious about where you trace the origins of that. Would you say that you always had a &ldq... posted on Apr 4 2016 (25,646 reads)

two lives saved twice as good as one life saved?” I asked my friend. He thought about it and said, “Yes, from a 30,000 feet view, that seems reasonable, but something about it doesn’t sit right.” What is it about reducing a life to a number that feels uncomfortable? Time Jump: 1922, Munich German Middle School The teacher walked into the class and nodded. The class stood up and took the oath they recited daily before beginning lessons, “I was born to die for Germany.” As they took their seats, the teacher noticed  one boy still standing. They locked eyes, and the boy found his voice, “I think I was born to live for Germany,&r... posted on Mar 27 2017 (10,934 reads)

Angel is an indigenous leader, wise (Sioux) Lakota elder woman, mother of five children, and lifelong devoted water protector who helped initiate and maintain the Standing Rock camp since April 2016, and who was vital in the nonviolent resistance to the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. Her voice among the water protectors is one of integrating deep prayer with nonviolent direct action, guiding two women-led actions at Standing Rock. A spiritual activist from the Sicangu (Rosebud) tribe -- one of the seven tribes that conform the Lakota/Nakota/Dakota People in the Great Plains of North America -- Cheryl moves from a deep space of love and nonviolen... posted on Jan 7 2018 (8,750 reads)

at the Edge, Neil and I spoke about how to read a text as a Midrash and appreciate multiple interpretations. We also talked about body prayers and how they relate to how Jesus himself might have prayed. Neil also led us through a body prayer experience in relationship to the “I am” sayings of Jesus. And finally, we talked more about these “I am” sayings and how they were really designed as a communication to Jesus’ inner circle at the end of his life. Here’s my conversation with the very generous scholar, Neil Douglas-Klotz. To begin with, Neil, I’m wondering if you can introduce our listeners to the language of Aramaic. Give u... posted on Jul 28 2021 (7,269 reads)

we had the discipline. In his longtime column for The Guardian, and books with subtitles like Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, my guest Oliver Burkeman has long interrogated the possibilities for absurdity in self-help while also honoring the real and deep human longings it meets. And he himself became a time management and productivity “geek,” until one day, sitting on a bench in Brooklyn, he grasped that no one achieves perfect work–life balance — that in the end, even the most privileged of us rarely get around to doing the most important things. Where he went next is the conversation I have with him this hour: dee... posted on Jan 31 2022 (5,205 reads)

out of 37,000 guests. That’s quite an accolade. I know. It’s true. TT: Yes. In many ways, I think what Oprah did was giving a platform to the silencing of women, and making sure that there’s more awakening to women’s issues. And more awakening to education of women and girls. It wasn’t about me at all, though I am very grateful for being the vessel to carry the message, to continue to make sure that women own their voices, and they own their own spaces in life. TS: Here you are now, you say, this vessel for helping women own their voices and not be silenced. And I want our listeners to get a sense of the depth of obstacles that you encountered ... posted on May 24 2023 (2,781 reads)

FOR PICO IYER — THE ART OF STILLNESS KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: Pico Iyer is not a spiritual teacher or even, he says, a spiritual person per se. But he has become one of our most beloved and eloquent translators of the modern rediscovery of inner life. As a journalist and novelist, he travels the globe from Ethiopia to North Korea, and he lives in Japan. But he also experiences a remote Benedictine hermitage as his second home, retreating there many times each year. In this intimate conversation, we explore the “art of stillness” he practices — not in order to enrich the mountaintop, he writes, “but to bring calm into the motion of the world.&rdq... posted on Jul 10 2015 (19,977 reads)

follows is the transcript of an On Being interview between Krista Tippett and Rachel Naomi Remen. KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the wise people in our world. I quote from my conversation with her all the time. She’s a physician and a lyrical writer whose long struggle with Crohn’s disease has shaped her view of life and medicine. Living well, she says, is not about eradicating our wounds and weaknesses but understanding how they complete our identity and equip us to help others. The way we deal with losses, large and small, shapes our capacity to be present to all of our experiences. There’s a difference, she says, between curing and heal... posted on Jan 15 2019 (13,881 reads)

View Method has given rise to his acclaimed Soul Biographies Film Series, an experience of human presence viewed by millions. His subjects as well as viewers describe the Soul Biographies as an experience into full-spectrum awareness – a meditation of sorts. What follows is the transcript of the Awakin Call with Nic Askew, moderated by Preeta Bansal ,and hosted by Steve Elkins.  Steve Elkins: Our moderator today is Preeta. Preeta Bansal has had a lifelong passion for service which, for much of her life, took the form of public service. A constitutional lawyer by background, Preeta has served in some of the most senior posts in the governmental... posted on Apr 11 2023 (3,061 reads)

416 weeks, or almost 3,000 days. This is the amount of time that I have not had a fixed home; moving to a new country, culture and language every few months and taking absolutely everything I own with me. It has been a significant percentage of my life, and it’s still long from over. I had actually done some travelling before - a couple of summers in the states, and an entire month already in Spain. But about this time back in 2003, on the week of my 21st birthday, I left Ireland for good. I had graduated university a few days before, and knew that I’d only be coming back “home” for visits (I’ve n... posted on Jul 17 2011 (62,229 reads)

the last couple of days, I conducted a little social experiment. I asked different people a very important question, perhaps the most important question of all: Why are you here? I wanted to know what other people think about the meaning of life and what we can learn from it. I asked my friends, I talked to my parents and I called my grandparents. I’ve asked strangers on the streets, children from friends and random people in the subway. It is absolutely incredible how willing people are to open up when you sincerely ask for their opinion on something important. And the experiences while gathering the stories are something else as well. I got kicked out of a school, had ... posted on Jul 6 2017 (14,953 reads)

interview between Krista Tippett and Atul Gawande. Transcript Krista Tippett, host: What does a good day look like? This is the question that transformed Atul Gawande’s practice of medicine. He’s a citizen physician on frontiers of human agency and meaning in light of what modern medicine makes possible. And for the millions who have read his book, Being Mortal, he’s also opened new conversation about the ancient human question of death and what it might have to do with life. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating] Atul Gawande: The conversation I felt like I was having was, do we fight, or do we give up? And the reality was that it&rsq... posted on Jan 11 2018 (28,590 reads)

episode originally aired on June 4, 2015.  Krista Tippett, host:Pico Iyer is not a spiritual teacher or even, he says, a spiritual person per se. But he has become one of our most beloved and eloquent translators of the modern rediscovery of inner life. As a journalist and novelist, he travels the globe from Ethiopia to North Korea, and he lives in Japan. But he also experiences a remote Benedictine hermitage as his second home, retreating there many times each year. In this intimate conversation, we explore the “art of stillness” he practices — not in order to enrich the mountaintop, he writes, “but to bring calm into the motion of the world.&r... posted on Feb 5 2019 (8,317 reads)

varied roles within biological networks, as heard through the acoustics of a dozen trees around the world, which he visited regularly. David's innovative approaches to teaching and fieldwork, his radical commitment to a whole-bodied study of the natural world, and his remarkable lyrical gifts have yielded a lush and Illuminating body of work that returns us to our place in the web. As one reviewer put it, "With a poet's ear and and a naturalist's eye, Haskell re-roots us in life's grand creative struggle and encourages us to turn away from empty individuality. The Songs of Trees reminds us that we're not alone and never have been. What follows is the edited tr... posted on Mar 22 2019 (4,918 reads)

such a common feeling, and it’s episodic, too. I mean, as you and I speak, I think it’s really high, like the world just seems again to be falling apart. And one of the ironies about this book, Real Change, was it came out in the middle—not even the middle, kind at the beginning of the pandemic.   SS: When everything was sort of lending itself to the feeling of shut down and can’t do anything, and as they say, in the book, one of my icons in life is the Statue of Liberty. What I hadn’t really realized so much until working on the book was that she’s a woman on the move. She’s in mid stride. One of her legs is halfway up&... posted on Apr 8 2022 (2,598 reads)

you so much. What an honor to be in conversation today with Carrie Newcomer, who is an absolute national treasure. She is a singer, songwriter, recording artist, and educator. The Boston Globe described her as a “prairie mystic” and Rolling Stone wrote that she is one who “asks all the right questions.” She has been called a “conversational, introspective” songwriter who “celebrates and savors the ordinary sacred moments of life”. And Krista Tippett notes that Carrie is “best known for her story-songs that get at the raw and redemptive edges of human reality.” Carrie has produced an amazing array of ... posted on Jul 15 2023 (2,641 reads)

rhymed, it had an ocean metaphor, and it was roundabout how no one quite understood me, which is probably how all 13-year-old girls feel. But no, I don’t have access to most of my high school writing. It lives somewhere, and I wish I still had all of that stuff, but the earliest poems that I have access to are from college. TS: One of the things that I read about you is that you don’t think of yourself primarily as a storyteller, but more someone who thinks and experiences life in sensory experience. I wanted to understand more about that, experiencing life in sensory experience. What does that mean? How do you know which sensory experience is so scintillating that it l... posted on Aug 10 2023 (2,876 reads)