Jane Goodall, In Memoriam (1934-2025)
On What It Means to Be Human
Dear friends,
I have been away from The Pause for a couple of months, pushing forward a book that feels like the quarter-century of On Being speaking into this world we inhabit now.
And, as I was preparing to write to you, word came of Jane Goodall’s passing. A theme of my book is the possibility of wholeness — that we are a generation of our species that can and must learn to become whole human beings, with whole institutions, living in whole communities and societies. A deep calling of being alive now is to tend the quality of our presence in this breaking, hurting world to foreshadow and make the world we want to inhabit in the beyond of it.
Jane Goodall embodied this attentive way of being and living and growing. She held to a sense of time’s long working and aspired to the healing of whole ecosystems. With that perspective, she discerned and set to the immediate work to be done. She spent decades studying and ever better understanding her beloved chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park. She then began to realize, in her 60s, that her next calling was to generously meet the human realities, fears, and misunderstandings that, unattended, would keep Gombe’s long-term flourishing fragile. She spent her last decades of life on the road, often with young people. And so, my conversation with the great primatologist at the end of her life circled around her wisdom on the matter of what it means to be human.
I believe that this century and its advanced economies and technologies are circling us all around, finally, to reckon with the raw, original problem — and highest promise — of ourselves.
The beautiful array of humans that has gathered around On Being keeps my hope muscular — not in every moment, but again and again. I feel all of the wise and graceful lives I’ve met in conversation, on air and off, walking beside me in life and in writing.
I will share more about what is on my mind and heart here in the Pause in the months to come. For now, listen to Jane, take in her good and generous and discerning life, and know yourself accompanied across space and time.
With love,
Krista
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Jane's death hit me harder than I would have expected. She was a great woman in all the ways I admire and respect. May we rise to her call to care for our Mother Earth and all who reside here.
May her memory be a blessing.