We are opening a reflection/course experience, The Hope Portal, curated by Krista and drawing upon her conversations with several visionary humans: @adriennemareebrown , @nshihab2018 , @ocean_vuong , @joyharjoforreal , 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.
Join us. Listen wherever you find podcasts. Instructions to download our free downloadable journal is included in the show notes.
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Illustration: Jesse Zhang
“I still have the best three-point shot of any Canadian poet born before 1943” is one of the first things that acclaimed poet Don McKay says in this expansive and intimate exchange.
This week on Poetry Unbound, we are thrilled to offer this conversation between host @padraigotuama and Don, recorded from a virtual interview held on the occasion of Don receiving the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Griffin Poetry Prizes. After touching on his early devotion to basketball, Don speaks of his lifelong passion for geology and birds, how Newfoundland is considered “opera for geologists,’” and why he favors membership over mastery when it comes to relating to Earth’s other living creatures.
Listen for yourself, wherever you stream podcasts.
#poetry #poems #poetrycommunity #contemplation #podcast #meditation #writing #translation #classics
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 us now.
Photo: Sarah Bidgood for @PerfectEarthProject
Thanks to @PenguinPress and W New York - Union Square @wnyunionsquare
On the 59th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" speech, hundreds gathered at Riverside Church for reflection, song, and a reading of his words. Krista sat down with Michelle Alexander and Lucas Johnson, two people shaped by Vincent Harding (who drafted the speech), for a conversation about the "fierce urgency of now" at Riverside Church. The event was produced by a new project at Union Theological Seminary called “Into the Crowd,” which brings nourishing stories of faith into our broader public life.
This special episode is out now wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Find this episode on our website or wherever you find your podcasts.
An evening with Krista Tippett.
As founder of @onbeing , her work has become a touchstone for depth, moral imagination and sensemaking.
In conversation with Berry Liberman, she’ll reflect on a life spent in dialogue with thinkers exploring the deepest questions of our lives - across spirituality, science and social healing.
In a tender, tumultuous world, how do we orient toward what is life-giving?
If you’re longing for an evening of wisdom and nourishment, we’d love you to join us.
11 May
Melbourne, Australia
For more information, visit the link in bio under ‘Upcoming events’ at @smallgiants
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. Jason’s perspective is so urgent for the world we’ve now walked into: on giving ourselves grace to be hopeless, the virtue of stamina, and the hope that stays strong in him from his life in relationship with the very young in our midst — “the arbiters and purveyors of the future” — as well as an occasional stranger in a bar. Jason himself is preternaturally wise as well as talented and kind and humble. He’s become a friend across the years and is one of my favorite people in the world.
Listen wherever you find podcasts. Also at onbeing.org
Photo: D. Bayer @AspenIdeas
We’re thrilled to welcome Krista Tippett to the Wisdom & Action Forum 2026 - Trust in the Age of AI, where she’ll invite us into deeper questions of intelligence, embodiment, connection, and what it means to be alive in this moment of transformation.
Across 25 years of @onbeing , Krista has been in conversation with some of the most thoughtful and courageous minds of our time. A Peabody Award–winning broadcaster, bestselling author, she has helped millions make sense of the human condition.
If you can’t make it to the forum, we are excited to also be hosting Krista at a side event, in conversation with our co founder @berryfeather .
Head to our link in bio to learn more about the Wisdom & Action Forum 5–7 May 2026. Melbourne, Australia
You’ll also find details to register for our In Conversation event – 11 May 2026. Melbourne, Australia
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. Find this episode in the link in our bio and our most recent season wherever you listen to podcasts.
Have you ever watched, in awe, as a skilled gymnast or skater lifts off and completes a dizzying number of revolutions in less than a second before landing safely back down? That’s how you may feel upon reading the great Leonard Cohen’s urgent, dreamlike poem “I, 8”, the focus of this Poetry Unbound episode, hosted by @padraigotuama . In his telling of a man’s fall “from his high place” into “disgrace,” Cohen sends us on a short, 206-word journey that seamlessly weaves together narration, fiction, meditation, devotion, and prayer.
Listen for yourself, wherever you stream podcasts.
Written description of image: An excerpt from Leonard Cohen’s Book of Mercy “I, #8” on a textured background. It reads: “In the eyes of men he falls, and in his own eyes too. He falls from his high place, he trips on his achievement. He falls to you, he falls to know you. ”
#poetry #poems #poetrycommunity #contemplation #podcast #meditation #writing #translation #classics
New episode: Krista in conversation with Gül Dölen at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. #aspenideas
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.
📸 Leigh Vogel
Will you leave this week’s Poetry Unbound episode, hosted by @padraigotuama , feeling uplifted, envious, curious, or something else entirely? Yes.
The poem “Subarctica” by Billy-Ray Belcourt (@nakinisowin ) transports you to a vividly specific time — “the coldest December / on record, I haven’t left my mother’s / house in over a week” — where the primary view is of poplars in “a tiny schoolyard”. Amid the simplicity and snow, the speaker shifts their perspective, seeing beyond their past and towards the wonder in their present and in what is to come.
Listen for yourself, wherever you stream podcasts.
Written description of image: An excerpt from Billy-Ray Belcourt’s ”Subarctica” on a textured background. It reads: “I love how simple / it is to live right now (it so rarely is), how / small and inconsequential my desires are / (which rarely are). ”
#poetry #poems #poetrycommunity #contemplation #podcast #meditation #writing #translation #classics
