New From Poetry Unbound: A Series on Conflict and the Human Condition

In 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 Being’s 2021 Midwinter Gathering, she offered this brief, practical, gently guided practice as an invitation to befriend your beleaguered body, to “blanket it with a little bit of tenderness, a little bit of kindness.”Delve more deeply into Runyan’s wisdom in her On Being conversation with Krista, “On Healing Our Distressed Nervous Systems.”Christine Runyan is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at UMass Chan Medical School. She is also a certified mindfulness teacher, and she co-founded and co-leads Tend Health, a clinical consulting practice focused on the mental well-being of medical and health care workers.Find the transcript for this practice at onbeing.org.Watch an animated version of this practice on our YouTube page.

The 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 Christine Runyan, which took place in the dark middle of those years, helps make sense of our present of still-unfolding epidemic distress — as individuals, as communities, as a species. She has cultivated a reverence for the human nervous system. She tells truths about our bodies that western medicine itself is only fitfully learning to see. This quiet conversation is not just revelatory, but healing and calming. It holds startling prescience about some of what we're navigating now. And it offers self-compassion and simple strategies for finding ease within ourselves — and with each other — as we live forward from here.Christine Runyan is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at UMass Chan Medical School. She is also a certified mindfulness teacher, and she co-founded and co-leads Tend Health, a clinical consulting practice focused on the mental well-being of medical and health care workers.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in March 2021.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

We 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 poetry at a live On Being event in January 2024. We could not have imagined the lightning in a bottle that unfolded — a live adaptation of the title poem that appears in Drew's wonderful new book, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves.Be sure to listen to his full 2022 conversation (accompanied by poetry and birdsong) with Krista — “Pathfinding Through the Improbable.” And find our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. In 2022, he was named the Poet Laureate of Edgefield County, South Carolina, where he grew up. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature and a collection of poetry and meditations, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts. His new book is Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves.

Here 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 is the bully that coerces us into giving up on democracy." This conversation is a kind of guide to generative shared deliberations we might be having with each other and ourselves in this intensely fraught global political moment: on the human underlay that gives democracy its vigor or threatens to undo it; on the difference between facts and truth — and on the difference between violence and power. Krista interviewed Lyndsey once before, in 2017, after Hannah Arendt's classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, had become a belated runaway bestseller. Now Lyndsey has published her own wonderful book offering her and Arendt's full prescient wisdom for this time. What emerges is elevating and exhilaratingly thoughtful — while also brimming with helpful, practicable words and ideas. We have, in Lyndsey's phrase, "un-homed" ourselves. And yet we are always defined by our capacity to give birth to something new — and so to partake again and again in the deepest meaning of freedom.Hannah Arendt's other epic books include The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she famously coined the phrase "the banality of evil." She was born a German Jew in 1906, fled Nazi Germany and spent many years as a stateless person, and died an American citizen in 1975. This conversation with Lyndsey Stonebridge happened in January 2024, as part of a gathering of visionaries, activists, and creatives across many fields. Krista interviewed her alongside Lucas Johnson, a former leader of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation who now leads our social healing initiatives at The On Being Project.Lyndsey Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Her 2024 book is We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Her other books include Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.Lucas Johnson is Executive Vice President of Public Life & Social Healing at The On Being Project. He was previously a leader of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, the world’s oldest interfaith peace organization.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.Note: A previous version of this audio mistakenly attributed a quote to James Baldwin. The author of the quote is Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, and appears in an essay she wrote discussing Baldwin’s work.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

A 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. In this first offering, Pádraig introduces the intriguing idea of poems as teachers and ponders Wisława Szymborska’s “A Word on Statistics," translated by Joanna Trzeciak. This poem covers statistics of the most human kind — like the number of people in a group of 100 who think they know better, who can admire without envy, or who could do terrible things. Listen, and ask yourself: Which categories do I belong to? Which do I believe?Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.All seven parts of the series are ready for listening now in the Poetry Unbound feed and at onbeing.org. Read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all of our episodes.

There 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 singular model of brilliance and graciousness of mind and spirit and action. And to be with her is to open to the way the stories we tell have blunted us to the courage we’re called to, and the joy we must nurture, as life force and fuel for the work ahead. As a young woman, she left her home state of Louisiana and land to which her family belonged for generations, to go to college and become a powerful lawyer in Washington, D.C. Then in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina made, as she has said, "a crack in the universe," she returned home to a whole new life and calling. Colette Pichon Battle is a vivid embodiment of the new forms societal shift is taking in our world — led by visionary pragmatists close to the ground, in particular places, persistently and lovingly learning and leading the way for us all.Colette Pichon Battle is co-founder and Vision & Initiatives Partner for Taproot Earth, a global organization which has emerged from the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy that she founded and led in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She and her colleagues are influencing manifold aspects of our ecological present, including equitable disaster recovery and global migration, community economic development and energy democracy.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in March 2022.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

In 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 conversation, along with good measures of raucous laughter and a few tears, Kate summons us to hearts "capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries of ourselves and each other" — qualities these years in the life of the world call forth from all of us, young and old, with ever greater poignancy and vigor.Kate DiCamillo has written many bestselling books, beloved by children and adults in touch with their inner eight-year-old, for two decades, including Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, The Magician’s Elephant, Flora & Ulysses, and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Some of these have been turned into operas and movies. Her new books in 2024 include the middle grade novel Ferris and Orris and Timble: The Beginning. She is a rare two-time winner of the Newbery Medal.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in March 2022.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

A special two-month season of On Being starts May 9. Freshly curated conversations from across the On Being archive. Big new conversations and extra offerings. To be present to the suffering and sorrow of this world from a place of love. To accompany each other in this — and accompany the young. To honor the fragility of being human. To keep our capacity for joy alive as a human birthright — and as fuel for resilience. To grasp the relationship between violence and power. To listen to our bodies, and metabolize the distress of our collective nervous system.To practice the power of imagination and create new worlds and new ways of living.To take the natural world as teacher and guide as we stand before the species-level shifts we're called to.To nurture hearts "capacious enough" for the complexities and mysteries of ourselves and each other. Join us.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

Here 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 dimensions of what music is about. This Australian musician, writer, and actor first made a name in the wild world of ’80s post-punk and later with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He also underwent public struggles with addiction and rehab.Since the accidental death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015, and a few years later, the death of his eldest child Jethro, he has entered yet another transfigured era, co-created an exquisite book called Faith, Hope and Carnage, and become a frank and eloquent interlocutor on grief. As a human and a songwriter, Nick Cave is an embodiment of a life examined and evolved. He sat with Krista in the On Being studio in Minneapolis, and the gorgeous conversation that followed is woven in this episode with his gorgeous music.Nick Cave is the songwriter and lead singer of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Their albums include Ghosteen, Skeleton Tree, and Push the Sky Away. Nick's recent albums with frequent collaborator Warren Ellis include Seven Psalms and Carnage. His book, which takes the form of an electric conversation with journalist Seán O’Hagan, is Faith, Hope and Carnage. He frequently writes, and answers questions from his fans, on the website The Red Hand Files.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and news and invitations all year round.

A little musing on this season, the spectacular finale headed your way — and ways to stay connected in the time ahead.Subscribe to the The PauseFind our Starting PointsPeruse our LibrariesAnd on YouTube, grab a Poem to Carry in Your Pocket