The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, revered Zen master, teacher, and poet, died on January 22, 2022, in his native Vietnam. Brother Thay, as he was known by his community and students, transmuted what he had experienced of chaos and bloodshed in his country and his life into an ability to speak with equal measures directness and compassion to the many conflicts and bewilderments of contemporary life. Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was a great teacher of the wonderf...
Jan 27, 2022•41 min•Ep. 1027
Krista interviewed Cheri Maples around the edges of a retreat with revered Zen master, teacher, and poet Thich Nhat Hanh in 2003. Parts of this interview, as well as Krista’s conversation with Thich Nhat Hanh, appear in our show, Remembering Thich Nhat Hanh, Brother Thay. Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org Cheri Maples served in the criminal justice system for 25 years, including as an Assistant Attorney General in the Wisconsin Department of Justice, and as a police officer with t...
Jan 27, 2022•22 min•Ep. 1025
Krista interviewed Larry Ward around the edges of a retreat with revered Zen master, teacher, and poet Thich Nhat Hanh in 2003. Parts of this interview, as well as Krista’s conversation with Thich Nhat Hanh, appear in our show, Remembering Thich Nhat Hanh, Brother Thay. Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org Larry Ward is co-founder of the Lotus Institute, and was ordained as a Dharma teacher in Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village tradition. He accompanied Thich Nhat Hanh on peace-building ...
Jan 27, 2022•19 min•Ep. 1026
Michael Pollan is one of our most revelatory explorers of the interaction between the human and natural worlds — especially the plants with which we have, as he says, co-evolved — from food to caffeine to psychedelics. In this episode of our series, The Future of Hope, Wintering ’s Katherine May draws him out on the burgeoning human inquiry and science to which he’s now given himself over — the transformative applications of altered states for healing trauma and depression, for end-of-life care ...
Jan 20, 2022•51 min•Ep. 1024
Journalist Oliver Burkeman has made a delightful and important philosophical, spiritual, and practical investigation of all that is truly at stake in what we blithely refer to as “time management.” At this time of year, many of us are making plans and resolutions — treating time as part bully, part resource — something we could fit everything we want into if only we had the discipline. This conversation is offered up to release you from that illusion. He invites us into a new relationship with t...
Jan 13, 2022•51 min•Ep. 1023
Journalist Oliver Burkeman has made a delightful and important philosophical, spiritual, and practical investigation of all that is truly at stake in what we blithely refer to as “time management.” At this time of year, many of us are making plans and resolutions — treating time as part bully, part resource — something we could fit everything we want into if only we had the discipline. This conversation is offered up to release you from that illusion. He invites us into a new relationship with t...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 1022
The remarkable Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town and Nobel Laureate died in the closing days of 2021. He helped galvanize South Africa's improbably peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy. He was a leader in the religious drama that transfigured South African Christianity. And he continued to engage conflict well into his retirement, in his own country and in the global Anglican communion. Krista explored all of these things with him in this warm, soaring 2010 conversation — and how Desmo...
Jan 06, 2022•51 min•Ep. 1020
The remarkable Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town and Nobel Laureate died in the closing days of 2021. He helped galvanize South Africa's improbably peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy. He was a leader in the religious drama that transfigured South African Christianity. And he continued to engage conflict well into his retirement, in his own country and in the global Anglican communion. Krista explored all of these things with him in this warm, soaring 2010 conversation — and how Desmo...
Jan 06, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 1019
Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton collects sounds from around the world. He’s recorded inside Sitka spruce logs in the Pacific Northwest, thunder in the Kalahari Desert, and dawn breaking across six continents. An attentive listener, he says silence is an endangered species on the verge of extinction. He defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound but an absence of noise. We take in the world through his ears. Gordon Hempton is the founder of the One Square Inch of Silence Foundatio...
Dec 30, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1018
Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton collects sounds from around the world. He’s recorded inside Sitka spruce logs in the Pacific Northwest, thunder in the Kalahari Desert, and dawn breaking across six continents. An attentive listener, he says silence is an endangered species on the verge of extinction. He defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound but an absence of noise. We take in the world through his ears. Gordon Hempton is the founder of the One Square Inch of Silence Foundatio...
Dec 30, 2021•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 1017
Here we are in a religiously-infused season — and in a world in which more and more of us experience ourselves to be religious nomads, misfits, even refugees. This deep reality of our life together is often simplified in analyses of the decline of traditional religious identity, of the rise of the spiritual-but-not-religious. Yet there is abundantly, alongside all of that, a rising theological and liturgical searching, a passionate calling towards service that echoes the heart of the great tradi...
Dec 23, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1016
Here we are in a religiously-infused season — and in a world in which more and more of us experience ourselves to be religious nomads, misfits, even refugees. This deep reality of our life together is often simplified in analyses of the decline of traditional religious identity, of the rise of the spiritual-but-not-religious. Yet there is abundantly, alongside all of that, a rising theological and liturgical searching, a passionate calling towards service that echoes the heart of the great tradi...
Dec 23, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 1015
The esteemed writer Jane Hirshfield has been a Zen monk and a visiting artist among neuroscientists. She has said this: “It’s my nature to question, to look at the opposite side. I believe that the best writing also does this … It tells us that where there is sorrow, there will be joy; where there is joy, there will be sorrow … The acknowledgement of the fully complex scope of being is why good art thrills … Acknowledging the fullness of things,” she insists, “is our human task.” And that’s the ...
Dec 16, 2021•50 min•Ep. 1014
The esteemed writer Jane Hirshfield has been a Zen monk and a visiting artist among neuroscientists. She has said this: “It’s my nature to question, to look at the opposite side. I believe that the best writing also does this … It tells us that where there is sorrow, there will be joy; where there is joy, there will be sorrow … The acknowledgement of the fully complex scope of being is why good art thrills … Acknowledging the fullness of things,” she insists, “is our human task.” And that’s the ...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 1013
In so many stories and fables that shape us, cold and snow, the closing in of the light — these have deep psychological as much as physical reality. This is “wintering,” as the English writer Katherine May illuminates in her beautiful, meditative book of that title — at once a season of the natural world, a respite our bodies require, and a state of mind. Krista first spoke with Katherine in midwinter 2020, and their conversation continues to offer a helpful container for our pandemic time: as o...
Dec 09, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1012
In so many stories and fables that shape us, cold and snow, the closing in of the light — these have deep psychological as much as physical reality. This is “wintering,” as the English writer Katherine May illuminates in her beautiful, meditative book of that title — at once a season of the natural world, a respite our bodies require, and a state of mind. Krista first spoke with Katherine in midwinter 2020, and their conversation continues to offer a helpful container for our pandemic time: as o...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 1011
What if the future of well-being is about “tipping the scales in the world away from fear and toward love”? And what if it’s a surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy, who talks this way? Krista draws him out with his friend, the groundbreaking neuroscientist Richard Davidson. Together they carry deep intelligence and vision from the realms of science and public health, expansively understood. They explore all we are learning to help move us forward as a species. This conversation...
Dec 02, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1010
What if the future of well-being is about “tipping the scales in the world away from fear and toward love”? And what if it’s a surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy, who talks this way? Krista draws him out with his friend, the groundbreaking neuroscientist Richard Davidson. Together they carry deep intelligence and vision from the realms of science and public health, expansively understood. They explore all we are learning to help move us forward as a species. This conversation...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 1009
Jane Goodall’s early research studying chimpanzees helped shape the self-understanding of our species and recalled modern Western science to the fact that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. In honor of the publication of her 32nd book — The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times — we’re re-releasing her beautiful conversation with Krista over Zoom from pandemic lockdown. From her decades studying chimpanzees in the Gombe forest to her more recent years attending to human pov...
Nov 24, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1008
Jane Goodall’s early research studying chimpanzees helped shape the self-understanding of our species and recalled modern Western science to the fact that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. In honor of the publication of her 32nd book — The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times — we’re re-releasing her beautiful conversation with Krista over Zoom from pandemic lockdown. From her decades studying chimpanzees in the Gombe forest to her more recent years attending to human pov...
Nov 24, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 1007
Pico Iyer is an esteemed journalist and essayist, and an explorer of inner life — for himself and in 21st-century society. For this episode in our Future of Hope series, he draws out writer Elizabeth Gilbert and “her sense of hope based not on a confidence in happy endings, but the conviction that something makes sense — even if not a sense that we can grasp.” Pico’s questions and Liz’s answers are all the more poignant given that both of them have recently suffered deep losses. These two friend...
Nov 18, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1006
When Krista interviewed the psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk for the first time, his book The Body Keeps the Score was about to be published. She described him then as “an innovator in treating the effects of overwhelming experiences on people and society.” She catches up with him in 2021 — as we are living through one vast overwhelming experience after the other. And The Body Keeps the Score is now one of the most widely read books in the pandemic world. His perspective is...
Nov 11, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1005
Krista interviewed the psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk for the first time in 2013, as his book The Body Keeps the Score was about to be published. He is an innovator in treating the effects of overwhelming experiences. We call this “trauma” when we encounter it in life and news, and we tend to leap to address it by talking. But Bessel van der Kolk knows how some experiences imprint themselves beyond where language can reach. He explores state-of-the-art therapeutic treatme...
Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 1004
How to embrace what’s right and corrective, redemptive and restorative — and an insistence that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve done — these are gifts Bryan Stevenson offers with his life. He’s brought the language of mercy and redemption into American culture in recent years, growing out of his work as a lawyer with the Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Alabama. Now the groundbreaking museum they created in Montgomery has dramatically expanded — a new way of engaging t...
Nov 04, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1003
How to embrace what’s right and corrective, redemptive and restorative — and an insistence that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve done — these are gifts Bryan Stevenson offers with his life. He’s brought the language of mercy and redemption into American culture in recent years, growing out of his work as a lawyer with the Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Alabama. Now the groundbreaking museum they created in Montgomery has dramatically expanded — a new way of engaging t...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 1002
Where to turn to find my place of standing when it feels like the world is on fire? This question surfaced in a public conversation Krista had just a couple of years ago with Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson, two poet-contemplatives. Pádraig weaves together social healing, poetry, and theology. Marilyn is a lyrical excavator of stories that would rather stay hidden — yet as she coaxes them into the light, they lead to new life. This conversation is a pleasure and balm, and a reminder that the ...
Oct 28, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1001
Where to turn to find my place of standing when it feels like the world is on fire? This question surfaced in a public conversation Krista had just a couple of years ago with Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson, two poet-contemplatives. Pádraig weaves together social healing, poetry, and theology. Marilyn is a lyrical excavator of stories that would rather stay hidden — yet as she coaxes them into the light, they lead to new life. This conversation is a pleasure and balm, and a reminder that the ...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 1000
Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most esteemed atmospheric scientists in the world. She’s made her mark by connecting dots between climate systems and weather patterns and the lived experience of human beings in their neighborhoods and communities. She’s also an ambassador, if you will, between the science of climate change and the world of evangelical Christian faith and practice, which she also inhabits. To delve into that with her is to learn a great deal that refreshingly complicates the pictu...
Oct 21, 2021•51 min•Ep. 999
Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most esteemed atmospheric scientists in the world. She’s made her mark by connecting dots between climate systems and weather patterns and the lived experience of human beings in their neighborhoods and communities. She’s also an ambassador, if you will, between the science of climate change and the world of evangelical Christian faith and practice, which she also inhabits. To delve into that with her is to learn a great deal that refreshingly complicates the pictu...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 998
We’re in a time as thick with uncertainty as with possibility. Many of us are still, and again, exhausted — and yet opening, fitfully, to what we’ve learned and have been called to at this moment in the life of the world. Toward nourishing that, the second offering in our new series, The Future of Hope, with social creative Darnell Moore in conversation with filmmaker dream hampton. The influence they wield spans hip-hop to Netflix to the Oscars; from the Movement for Black Lives to Surviving R....
Oct 14, 2021•52 min•Ep. 997
