Live in the Whole of Time, with Joy Harjo
Hope Portal, Session 6
Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also former Poet Laureate of the United States.
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.”
It is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She’s always known it — never lost it — and she beckons us to enter and relearn.
Journaling prompts for Session 6
Summon your 200-Year present. Take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and to the oldest person you remember holding you. Roughly calculate the year of their birth and the history that shaped their lifetime.
And who is the youngest person you have held in your arms most recently? Imagine a robust life for them — both the age and year to which they could live.
Try to inhabit this expanse of history that you have literally touched and been touched by. Can you feel in your body, in your imagination, a more spacious grasp of time itself and of possibility and agency? What difference might it make?
We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.
Or listen wherever podcasts are found.
Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.
Just beginning? Read our introduction for a possible way to organize your experience.
The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.
To witness Joy Harjo speak of “the whole of time” is to feel the linear clock crack open and spill stardust on your lap. This isn’t just memory—it’s time travel through touch, a sacred relay between womb and ancestor, dream and dirt.
That 200-year present? It’s not a thought exercise. It’s a medicine ceremony for our chronically dislocated spirits. We’ve been trapped in the tyranny of the immediate for too long—scrolling, sprinting, reacting like our ancestors weren’t watching and our descendants aren’t whispering from the future.
Harjo doesn’t just remind us we come from somewhere. She reminds us we stretch. Across generations. Across blood and breath. Across songs we didn’t write but somehow remember.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s orientation. It's how we walk forward without forgetting the sacred behind us.
Gratitude to On Being for building portals instead of platforms. And to Joy—for calling us home without ever raising her voice.
Thank you Krista and Joy!