Joy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6

Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muskogee Creek Nation, and she's also former poet laureate of The United States. She grew up in the state I grew up in, Oklahoma. But we might as well have grown up in parallel universes. Part of the rupture of our time, for many of us, is revisiting history we thought we knew, seeing in a whole new light places we thought we inhabited. And that is very much true of growing up in Oklahoma. It's very much true of me that I have work to do for the rest of my life to reconcile terrible stories I did not learn or did not hear, to take in unimaginable cruelty and atrocity for which I must take some responsibility, also to take in beauty I didn't see. So I grew up in a town called Shawnee, not knowing who Shawnee was. Joy Harjo's ancestors landed in Tulsa, which was at the end of the Trail Of Tears. They were sent there after being forcibly removed from their homelands in the Deep South. She has composed a glorious life out of very hard beginnings. But from the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it the whole of time, w h o l e. When she does that, she reminds me of Einstein, the way Einstein reimagined the reality of time, which is quite different from how we perceive it with our senses. Time, he reminded science, is not an arrow moving forward. It is relative, not fixed. Seen at a deep level, it's not a compartmentalized past, present, and future. Past, present, and future are all happening, interacting with each other all the time. And we actually know this. We experience it constantly in our thoughts, and in our hearts, in our lives. But the way we structured the modern world and our daily lives hasn't caught up with this fundamental reality. We are living in a Newtonian world of calendars and clocks and deadlines and hard stops. Years ago, when I did a show about Einstein and spoke with another physicist about Einstein's sense of time, he said that what Einstein really did with high physics is restore time to the heart of nature where it had always been in traditional cultures, in human cultures, and that is time as seasonal, cyclical, generational. This is also the sense of time in our religious traditions. It is the understanding of time in Martin Luther King Junior's evocation of the long arc of the moral universe that bends towards justice. And it is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She's always known …