Krista Tippett

Give people the mess →

Published 11 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Oct 5  ·  

https://overcast.fm/+AATXlFld6-4/1:12:18

Today in a call with Steve H and friends, I was reminded I’d sat on sharing this…

This is from On Being. Specifically from the unedited version: Krista Tippett releases the whole raw conversation alongside the produced show, and this one is with the poet Ocean Vuong, recorded on stage at On Air Fest in March 2020 — or, as she puts it, right before the world changed. After about an hour they opened the floor, and a producer and professor from Toronto — she uses those raw interviews as a teaching tool in her own classroom — asked Tippett a question about her own work rather than Vuong’s: how do you choose what to cut?

Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. Well, so so you know, sometimes people who are younger ask me, “How did you start your podcast? And I say, “Well, we started a public radio show. And they look at me like, “You know, what am I talking about? So because you know, podcast didn’t exist when we started this. So interestingly, I mean, even I had to fight so hard, you know, those years ago. Even to say we’re going to do one conversation for the whole hour-that felt way too long form. People were very uncomfortable with it, and as a result, we’re on not prime time. I want to be quick because I want to get back to you. But at some point before podcasting, maybe right as podcasting came along, Lily’s here. Actually, it wasn’t my idea. One of my producers, Trent Gillis, at the time said that if we really believe in this value, virtue of transparency that we talk about, that the digital world is calling us all to, then we need to walk the talk. And it felt really counterintuitive, having been in media before this digital world. And I think we had this impassioned discussion for a year. I was like, “Why do we do all this work to get it down to 51 minutes if we’re going to give people the mess? And it is messy. I mean, it’s this is less messy. But if I’m in the studio with somebody and I have 90 minutes, I can let them go down some road that I really don’t know if there’s going to be anything there, but it’s okay because there might be, and if not, we can come back. We found with younger people, and we found that it gets used in like high school classes, and because we have they we give the raw, they trust the rest of the media project more. So that it’s been, and it’s huge. It’s hundreds of 1000s. I mean, I don’t know what the numbers are now, but it’s a very large percent, very large numbers of people in every show who listen to the unedited.

~ Krista Tippett

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Seeking language large enough →

Published August 18  ·  All posts on Aug 18  ·  

I really enjoyed this (it’s a rebroadcast from 2016) episode of On Being with David Whyte.

David Whyte is an English poet and philosopher, born to a Yorkshire father and an Irish mother, who trained as a marine zoologist and worked as a naturalist guide in the Galápagos before returning to poetry full time. He is best known for The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, and for Consolations, his book of essays on the underlying meanings of everyday words. In this 2016 conversation, he speaks about what he calls the conversational nature of reality — the frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you — and about loss, vulnerability, aloneness, genius, and the strange work of bringing poetry into corporate leadership. Threaded through is his friendship with the late John O’Donohue and the grief of losing him. He recites four of his poems along the way.

https://onbeing.org/programs/david-whyte-seeking-language-large-enough/

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Human collaborators →

Published May 14, 2023  ·  All posts on May 14  ·  ,

And so we did the math, and it was really at the same time that I had lost [my idea] that she had gotten [her idea]. And we like to think that the idea jumped from my mind to hers during our little kiss that we had when we met. That’s our magical thinking around it. But it’s — there is no explanation for that other than the one that I’ve always abided by, which is that ideas are conscious and living, and they have will, and they have great desire to be made, and they spin through the cosmos, looking for human collaborators.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert from, The Muse Strikes Again

Elsewhere, this is 4usete5. — slipbox

Obviously that’s not how any of it really works. But it is a sublime, inspiring idea! I know that if I focus (or worse, fixate) on where some idea came from it’s easy to lose the delight of the overall thing. This cosmic perspective from Gilbert reminds me to simply take things and run with them. If I can. If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

If I can’t run with it, well, that’s okay too. It is simply okay. But, if I still need some self-convincing, that cosmic perspective gives me the comfort I need to let go.

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Generous listening →

Published October 16, 2021  ·  All posts on Oct 16

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability— a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one’s own best self and one’s own best words and questions.

~ Krista Tippett from, Krista Tippett: On Generous Listening and Asking Better Questions

Elsewhere, this is 4ufoki1. — slipbox

I haven’t [yet] read her book, but I’m in total agreement with this statement.

I’ve had several conversations where I’ve had, literally, no clue where we were going to go. If I try to worry about that… if I try to think ahead to come up with a destination… it never works out well. The urge to do that comes from my fear of being heard as a silly idiot; I’m the host, I should know how this is going to work out. But each time I manage to rise above that fear, good things happen. Sometimes even great things.

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It’s the journey →

Published October 10, 2021  ·  All posts on Oct 10  ·  

Tippet resurfaces questions many have explored before us. “What does it mean to be human? What matters in life? What matters in death? How to be of service to each other and the world?”

~ Shane Parrish from, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Art of Living

Elsewhere, this is 4ufoki2. — slipbox

Confirmation bias never ceases to amaze me. One minute, I’ve never noticed Tippett wrote a book. The suddenly I’m tripping over references and suggestions for it; Here’s a blog post from 2017 which I’m just reading 4 years later. And over here is a mention from another blogger. And then this podcaster. And so on.

Finding people, their work, their books, etc. feels like wandering through an ancient stand of Redwoods, (which is something I’ve actually done, just to be clear.) This stuff was here long before me, and will be here long after me. Sure, I’ve “hiked”—it’s just walking on a trail—far beyond the usual little loop which most tourists opt to explore. But way farther along, behold! Here is a bench, with a dedication. And even here people have been walking for, I dunno… 100 years now? I don’t even know exactly where this trail goes, but I can see up to the next bend, and the part I’ve already traveled has been purty durn neato. This other person exploring conversation and the human condition has, probably, already done more than I ever will. But that doesn’t take away from what I get from strolling the trail.

Because—as I hope you too have already discovered—it’s the journey that counts.

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