On Being

→ WHAT IT COVERS Four members of the Parents Circle Families Forum — Robi Damelin, Arab Aramin, Leora Eilon, and Mohamed Abu Jafar — share how losing family members to Israeli-Palestinian violence led each toward reconciliation rather than revenge. Their stories, told in New York City, trace the personal transformation from grief and hatred toward dialogue, friendship, and shared humanity.

→ WHAT IT COVERS UC Berkeley neuroscientist Gül Dölen presents her lab's research showing that psychedelics like MDMA, psilocybin, and ibogaine work by reopening "critical periods" in the brain — windows of heightened neuroplasticity that normally close after childhood — enabling durable healing from PTSD, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression when paired with structured therapeutic intervention.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Poets Joy Harjo (23rd US Poet Laureate, 2019–2022) and Tracy K. Smith (22nd US Poet Laureate, 2017–2019) join host Krista Tippett at Symphony Space in Manhattan to explore poetry as a practical technology for navigating fear, contradiction, collective division, and personal grief while building radical compassion across difference. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Poetry as nervous system tool:** Tracy K.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Jane Goodall reflects on her sixty-year journey from studying chimpanzees in Gombe to becoming an activist for conservation, discussing how her research revealed humanity's connection to nature and our responsibility to protect it. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Scientific empathy:** Goodall challenged Cambridge's doctrine that scientists must be objective without empathy, arguing that empathetic observation provides intuitive platforms for analysis that cold scientific approaches miss,...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Krista Tippett speaks with Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy and psychologist Anita Barrows about their translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, exploring solitude, love, uncertainty, and ecological crisis through his century-old wisdom. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Living Questions:** Rilke advises holding unresolved questions like closed rooms rather than seeking immediate answers.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Poet Ross Gay teaches how developing a delight practice builds resilience by orienting toward what we love, not just what we fight against. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Delight Radar Development:** Writing daily about delightful moments quickly trains perception to notice more joy, transforming ordinary interactions like strangers sharing shopping bag burdens into recognized sources of resilience.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Joy Harjo, former U.S. Poet Laureate and Muskogee Creek Nation member, teaches how living in the whole of time enables hope across seven generations despite historical trauma. → KEY INSIGHTS - **The Two Hundred Year Present:** Calculate from the oldest person who held you to the youngest you've held and their projected lifespan to tangibly experience a two hundred year span your life touches.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Philosopher Joanna Macy teaches how facing ecological grief transforms pain into love, unlocking capacity for sustained environmental activism through presence rather than forced optimism. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Pain as gateway:** Environmental apathy stems from fear of pain, not indifference. When you stay present with grief about ecological destruction and keep breathing, it transforms to reveal love for the world underneath.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Poet Ocean Vuong explores how language actively creates reality, arguing that violent metaphors shape culture and that deliberately choosing life-affirming words cultivates hope and possibility. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Language as world-building:** Words function as muscles that construct or destroy reality. The vocabulary we choose daily creates conditions that make either violence or compassion more likely to manifest in our lives and communities.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Poet Naomi Shihab Nye explains how writing things down creates mental health benefits by giving shape to emotions and fostering internal community among different selves. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Writing for wellbeing:** Writing down thoughts about difficult experiences almost always improves mood because it gives formless feelings a visible shape you can examine and address from distance.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Walter Brueggemann explores how Old Testament prophets used poetic language to disrupt comfortable assumptions, addressing contemporary crises through biblical texts about loss, hope, and societal transformation in consumer capitalist culture. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Prophetic poetry as disruption:** Biblical prophets functioned as uncredentialed poets who imagined their world differently according to covenantal tradition.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Adrienne Maree Brown explores how imagination shapes reality through organizing, drawing on Octavia Butler's speculative fiction and natural emergence patterns to reimagine social change. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Imagination Battle:** Current reality reflects imposed narratives of scarcity despite living in abundance. Radical imagination requires questioning inherited constructs and envisioning futures where everyone thrives without causing harm to each other.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Krista Tippett introduces a course on muscular hope as an active practice that confronts reality while refusing to accept current conditions as permanent or inevitable. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Hope as orientation:** Hope functions as a chosen practice and muscle requiring active flexing, not wishful thinking or optimism that things will naturally improve without deliberate effort and persistence.