On Being with Krista Tippett
by On Being Studios
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Robin Wall Kimmerer and Azita Ardakani Walton — To Bring Life Into a…
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About this podcast
Wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive.
Spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry.
Conversations to live by.
With a 20-year archive featuring luminaries like Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Desmond Tutu, each episode brings a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett,
Learn more about the On Being Project’s work in the world at onbeing.org.
Episodes
The newest 50 of 986 episodes
- Robin Wall Kimmerer and Azita Ardakani Walton — To Bring Life Into a Trembling World · 59 min · Episode 1164"What does it mean to bring life into a trembling world? What does it mean to bless existence without denying its terror?" These questions animated the writing of Azita Ardakani…
- Michael Pollan — The Mystery of Consciousness · 1 h 14 min · Episode 1163From Krista: Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears, is an exploration — with scientists and journalists and technologists and spiritual teachers — of what consciousness…
- “The Fierce Urgency of Now” — Michelle Alexander and Lucas Johnson · 1 h 16 min · Episode 1162From Krista: On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at Riverside Church in New York City called “A Time to Break Silence.” This is often referred to as his…
- Shai Held — On Love, and Judaism · 1 h 17 min · Episode 1161From 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…
- Jason Reynolds — On Hopelessness, the Virtue of Stamina, and Showing Grace to Ourselves · 52 min · Episode 1160From 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…
- Arab Aramin, Robi Damelin, Liora Eilon, Mohamed Abu Jafar — Turning Unbearable Loss Into Ground of Shared Life · 1 h 6 min · Episode 1159From 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…
- Gül Dölen — Psychedelic Science and Radical Healing · 1 h 8 min · Episode 1158From Krista: 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…
- Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith – "This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful." · 1 h 9 min · Episode 1157From 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. But in a room in New…
- A New Season for a Tender New Year · 1 min · Episode 1156Five 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…
- Jane Goodall, In Memoriam — What It Means to Be Human · 51 min · Episode 1008The 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…
- Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us · 51 min · Episode 1155This 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…
- Ross Gay — Hope Portal, Episode 7 · 10 min · Episode 1154Ross 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…
- Joy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6 · 17 min · Episode 1151Our 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…
- Joanna Macy — Hope Portal, Episode 5 · 12 min · Episode 1153Our 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. And she carries…
- Ocean Vuong — Hope Portal, Episode 4 · 11 min · Episode 1150If 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. The sweep…
- Naomi Shihab Nye — Hope Portal, Episode 3 · 9 min · Episode 1149In these next few sessions, we investigate some orientations and ways of being that are companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised to become stronger and more…
- Walter Brueggemann, In Memoriam — When the World We Have Trusted In Is Vanishing · 1 h 6 min · Episode 1152The 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…
- adrienne maree brown — Hope Portal, Episode 2 · 14 min · Episode 1148adrienne 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…
- Krista Tippett — Hope Portal, Episode 1 · 14 min · Episode 1147Beginning 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…
- Roberta Bondi — What is Prayer and How to Begin · 34 min · Episode 1146Buried treasure from the On Being archive! Krista writes of this conversation from the earliest pre-history of On Being: In the years in which I was on a whole new spiritual…
- Yochi Fischer and Loaay Wattad — On Seeing the Trauma of the Other · 1 h 36 min · Episode 1145This 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…
- Jason Reynolds and Kessley Janvier — On Being Young In America · 1 h 11 min · Episode 1144A heavy complexity is on the shoulders of the young of our species in these years — humans growing up in this time. At the same time, from the digital revolution and AI to the…
- David Bornstein — On Our Lives with the News · 55 min · Episode 1143A 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. The…
- Katsi Cook — "Women are the First Environment" · 55 min · Episode 1142Katsi Cook is a beacon in an array of quiet powerful worlds — a magnetic, joyous, loving presence. The public conversation we offer up here was part of a gathering where a…
- Justin Vernon — Being Bon Iver · 55 min · Episode 1141A 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…
- A New Season of On Being · 2 min · Episode 1140On 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…
- Remembering Nikki Giovanni — ‘We Go Forward With a Sanity and a Love’ · 51 min · Episode 1139The 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…
- Joan Baez — "This Gift of a Voice" · 58 min · Episode 1138She 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…
- adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life · 1 h 20 min · Episode 1137The wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming…
- “The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón · 2 min · Episode 1136An impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's reading of her piece, “The End…
- Atul Gawande — On Mortality and Meaning · 1 h 2 min · Episode 1135We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western…
- “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” by Elizabeth Alexander · 1 min · Episode 1134Today, a poem with a poignant question to live: “...and are we not of interest to each other?” Carry Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of her poem “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” with…
- Luis Alberto Urrea — On Our Belonging to Each Other · 59 min · Episode 1133We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, and refreshing…
- Ross Gay — On the Insistence of Joy · 59 min · Episode 1132In our world of so much suffering, it can feel hard or wrong to invoke the word "joy." Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying cries in almost every…
- Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton — On Nature's Wisdom for Humanity · 1 h 16 min · Episode 1131In this all-new episode, Krista engages biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus in a second, urgent conversation, alongside creative biomimicry practitioner Azita Ardakani Walton…
- Befriend Your Body: A Compassionate Body Scan · 11 min · Episode 1130In a time of stress, uncertainty, and isolation, Christine Runyan turns our attention to what often evades our awareness — the response of our nervous systems. As part of On…
- Christine Runyan — On Healing Our Distressed Nervous Systems · 1 h 1 min · Episode 1129The years of pandemic and lockdown are still working powerfully on us from the inside. But we have trouble acknowledging this, much less metabolizing it. This conversation with…
- “Joy is the Justice (We Give Ourselves)” by J. Drew Lanham · 14 min · Episode 1128We are overjoyed to share this heart-stirring performance with you, which transpired when we invited the ornithologist/poet/former On Being guest J. Drew Lanham to offer some…
- Lyndsey Stonebridge and Lucas Johnson — On Love, Politics, and Violence (Channeling Hannah Arendt) · 1 h 15 min · Episode 1127Here is a stunning sentence for you, written by Lyndsey Stonebridge, our guest this hour, channeling the 20th-century political thinker and journalist Hannah Arendt: "Loneliness…
- New From Poetry Unbound: A Series on Conflict and the Human Condition · 11 min · Episode 1126A taste of a special mini-season of Poetry Unbound — bringing contemplative curiosity and the life-nurturing tether of poetry to the very present matter of conflict in our world…
- Colette Pichon Battle — On Knowing What We're Called To · 1 h 2 min · Episode 1125There is an ecological transformation unfolding in the places we love and come from. On a front edge of this reality, which will affect us all, Colette Pichon Battle is a…
- Kate DiCamillo — On Nurturing Capacious Hearts · 54 min · Episode 1124In her writing, it is Kate DiCamillo's gift to make bearable the fact that joy and sorrow live so close, side by side, in life as it is (if not as we wish it to be). In this…
- Nick Cave — Loss, Yearning, Transcendence · 1 h 3 min · Episode 1122Here are some experiences to which Nick Cave gives voice and song: the "universal condition" of yearning, and of loss; a "spirituality of rigor"; and the transcendent and moral…
- A Word from Krista · 2 min · Episode 1121A little musing on this season, the spectacular finale headed your way — and ways to stay connected in the time ahead.
- Sara Hendren — Our Bodies, Aliveness, and the Built World · 1 h 1 min · Episode 1120Our built world is designed around something called "normal," and yet every single one of our bodies is mysterious, and constantly adapting for better or worse — and always…
- Christiana Figueres — Ecological Hope, and Spiritual Evolution · 1 h 19 min · Episode 1119The ecological crisis we are standing before is at once civilizational and personal — intimately close to each of us in the places we love and inhabit, and unfolding at a species…
- Clint Smith — What We Know in the "Marrow of Our Bones" · 1 h 4 min · Episode 1118This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory…
- “Dance Party” by Clint Smith · 2 min · Episode 1117Clint Smith reads his poem, “Dance Party.” This poem is featured in Clint’s On Being conversation with Krista, “What We Know in the ‘Marrow of Our Bones.’” Find more of his…
- “Ode to Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep” by Clint Smith · 2 min · Episode 1116Clint Smith reads his poem, “Ode to Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep.” This poem is featured in Clint’s On Being conversation with Krista, “What We…
- [Extended] Clint Smith with Krista Tippett · 1 h 48 min · Episode 1115This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory…
