On Being

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.

From Krista: I was longing for a deep dive on the radiant and common-sense hope that Jason Reynolds embodies after I interviewed him at a Georgetown event last year. I got my chance at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival.

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.

From Krista: The word “trauma” is used so widely at present, arguably too widely. But it bespeaks a tenor of our shared reality.

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.

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.

The great primatologist and humanitarian, Jane Goodall, died on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91. It is a joy and a comfort to revisit our last broadcast of her 2020 conversation with Krista. Jane Goodall began her epic work studying chimpanzees in the Gombe forest without even a college degree.

This rich, gorgeous conversation will fill your soul. The singular and beloved Joanna Macy died at home at the age of 96 on July 20, 2025. She has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us.

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.

Neuroscientist Gül Dölen on psychedelically-assisted therapies and the brain's capacity for change. Her research shows that psychedelics reopen 'critical periods' — windows of neuroplasticity that normally close after childhood.

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.

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.

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.

In these next few sessions, we investigate some orientations and ways of being that are companions to hope.

The great Christian scholar of the biblical prophets died on June 5, 2025. Yet, in the lineage of the prophets who called humanity to face its hardest realities, this profound, warm, and timeless conversation is a stunning offering straight into our present.

adrienne maree brown shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking. She works with the complex fullness of reality to move towards a wholeness of living.

Beginning today, and for the next six weeks in the On Being podcast feed and Substack, we’re opening 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 Ros

Buried treasure from the On Being archive!

This episode emerged from a private gathering in The Hague in the fall of 2024 with a small group of people who live in Israel — both Jewish and Palestinian, Jews and Palestinians who continue to share life.

A heavy complexity is on the shoulders of the young of our species in these years — humans growing up in this time.

A calming and helpful conversation for making sense of the very story of our time, and how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through media and journalism.

Katsi Cook is a beacon in an array of quiet powerful worlds — a magnetic, joyous, loving presence.

A sweet and searching conversation between Krista and the man behind Bon Iver at this year's On Air Fest, full of wisdom and revelation. He is a person who experiences deeply, who metabolizes creatively, and who just keeps growing.

On Being is back on April 16, with a special season tethered in the persistent beauty and courage of what it can mean to be human — six conversations Krista has had out in the world in recent months, followed by an experimental, seven-week reflection/action experience— Hope, Imagination, and Remakin

Young peoples literature ambassador Jason Reynolds on why stories are survival tools, how young people use literature to make sense of violence and identity, and why every body carries a narrative.

Two former U.S. Poets Laureate — Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo — on poetry as a form of knowledge that scientific and analytical thinking cannot access. Reading poetry as a practice of attention and presence.

Two former U.S. Poet Laureates on poetry as technology for accessing truth. Harjo and Smith discuss how poetry reaches truths that prose cannot — not through argument but through rhythm, image, and the body's response to language.

Classic re-release. Archbishop Desmond Tutu on forgiveness as a practice, not a feeling. Ubuntu — 'I am because we are' — as the foundation for post-conflict healing. Forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting; it means refusing to let hatred define you.

The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure.

A conversation from a private gathering in The Hague with Israelis and Palestinians who continue to share life amid intergenerational trauma. What happens when people who are supposed to be enemies refuse that narrative?

Classic re-release. Isabel Wilkerson on Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns. Race in America is better understood through the lens of caste — an inherited hierarchy that assigns worth at birth. Understanding the structure is the first step to changing it.

She is known as the voice of a generation. The Queen of Folk. A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington.

Jason Reynolds on hope as a discipline rather than a feeling. Young people as the 'arbiters and purveyors of the future.' Reynolds argues that hope isn't optimism — it's the stubborn insistence on showing up even when outcomes are uncertain.

David Bornstein on how the traditional theory of journalism — shining a light on what is wrong — has helped fuel fear and collapse of trust. Solutions journalism offers an alternative: reporting on how communities actually solve problems.

Classic re-release. Roshi Joan Halifax — Zen teacher, anthropologist, and hospice caregiver — on compassion as a practice rather than an emotion. True empathy requires training; untrained empathy leads to burnout and avoidance.

Rabbi Shai Held makes the case that love — not law — is the animating force of Jewish theology. How the Hebrew Bible constructs a God who loves fiercely and demands that humans love each other with the same intensity.

Classic re-release. Rachel Naomi Remen — physician, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom — on the difference between curing and healing. You can heal even when you can't cure. Healing is about wholeness, not the absence of disease.

Classic re-release. Parker Palmer on the inner life of social change agents, the sanctity of dissent, and why the inner journey and the outer journey are the same journey. You can't change the world while running from yourself.

Classic re-release. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, interbeing, and falling in love with the Earth. The practice of mindful walking, eating, and breathing as the foundation for social engagement and ecological consciousness.

Classic re-release. Robin Wall Kimmerer — botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation — on moss, reciprocity, and the intelligence of plants. Indigenous knowledge and Western science as complementary ways of knowing.

Classic re-release. Congressman John Lewis on nonviolent resistance, the 'Beloved Community,' and what sustained him through decades of civil rights work. Lewis's life as evidence that courage and love are not opposites.

Classic re-release. David Whyte on poetry, belonging, and the conversational nature of reality. Life is not a monologue you deliver but a conversation you join. Vulnerability is not weakness but the prerequisite for genuine encounter.

Colette Pichon Battle on climate justice in Louisiana's Gulf South. Frontline communities facing sea-level rise are developing resilience models that the rest of the world will need. Climate is not just an environmental issue — it's a justice issue.

Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke on why modern life produces a pervasive sense of meaninglessness, what ancient wisdom traditions got right about attention and transformation, and how we might address the meaning crisis.

Kate DiCamillo on children's literature as philosophy. Her books explore loss, love, courage, and the search for belonging — themes too important to reserve for adults. Children's capacity for wonder is itself a form of wisdom.

Classic re-release. Joanna Macy — Buddhist teacher, ecological philosopher, and systems thinker — on the 'Great Turning,' grief as a sign of love, and why despair is a necessary station on the path to action.

Classic re-release. Wendell Berry on why local economies, small farms, and community-scale life are not nostalgic but visionary. Industrial civilization fails the imagination — it can only think in terms of scale, efficiency, and growth.

U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón on wonder, the body, and the discipline of paying attention. Her poem 'In Praise of Mystery' was launched into space on the Europa Clipper mission. Poetry as technology for re-enchantment.

Classic re-release. Mary Oliver on attention as a form of prayer, the natural world as teacher, and how poetry saved her from a traumatic childhood. Oliver's radical practice: walking, looking, and writing what she sees.

Botanist and Potawatomi citizen Robin Wall Kimmerer on the intelligence of plants, the gift economy of nature, and what indigenous knowledge systems reveal about our relationship to the living world.

Classic re-release of one of On Being's most beloved episodes. Irish poet-philosopher John O'Donohue on beauty as a human calling, thresholds as places of transformation, and the Celtic imagination's insistence on the 'invisible world.'

Classic re-release. Ocean Vuong — Vietnamese-American poet and novelist — on language, immigration, the body as archive, and what it means to make a life worthy of the breath that sustains it.

Tippett curates excerpts from the On Being archive — voices of wisdom for navigating an uncertain year. Draws on John Lewis, Desmond Tutu, Mary Oliver, and others to construct a mosaic of courage, beauty, and moral clarity.

Krista Tippett opens 2024 with a solo reflection on hope as a practice and a portal — not optimism about the future but a discipline of engagement with the present. Drawing on 20 years of On Being conversations.