On Thresholds

... and crossing worthily

Such an honor and joy to host interfaith and religious innovators and leaders from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Palestine, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Saudi Arabia at the On Being Studios as a last gathering in this beautiful space that has been On Being's home for a momentous decade.

Dear Friends,

I keep thinking of the late John O’Donohue’s counsel that as much as we like to plan and project and imagine the future rolling out on planes of predictability and progress, life is marked by thresholds. We are thrust — sometimes by choice, but more often not  —from a reality we believed we understood to a new planet we must learn to breathe in and traverse. The point with thresholds, John said, is how we cross them. The challenge — the question to live — is this: How to cross them worthily?

I find that word "worthily" so rich, such a calling in and of itself. It asks us to tether not just in the question of what we will do but in tending the quality of our presence in the disorienting space and time that has opened. It beckons us to plant ourselves in the questions that have been a North Star for humanity and for the adventure that is On Being — the elemental, universal wonderings that our great spiritual traditions arose to address: What does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?

This matter of passage is acute for my country and the world right now, and it is intimate for me and On Being too. This past week, we said goodbye to the Loring Park studio and office space that has been such a beautiful creative laboratory and home since 2013. With accelerating velocity since the pandemic, the world has changed, and we have changed, and the reality of institutions has changed. What is required is metamorphosis. And so, as the new year opens, the On Being Project will become a much smaller operation, living more nimbly and responsively into the nexus of media and conversation and social healing that is the underlying calling of this work.

To be clear: The future will continue to hold new On Being episodes and Poetry Unbound episodes and events, and new kinds of audio, video, and written offerings. The places where our 24 years of content reside will continue to be alive and accessible: the podcast feeds, the website, this monthly newsletter, and more. But I will not be much “in the studio” — I’ll be, rather, out in the world, partnering with other organizations for live conversations and “quiet conversations” and convenings. Without children to raise and a full organization to lead, I will be free to lean into my public presence in this way and also to finish writing that has been gestating in me for years. Pádraig and Lucas will also continue to have On Being as a base. I will share more about the shape of what is to come in the months ahead.

For now, I am bowing deeply to the brilliant, beloved dream team of colleagues who make up the On Being Project of now. Each of them has forever marked and enriched me and this work, and I am in awe of how worthily they are crossing this threshold with each other and the world around them. My Minneapolis colleagues Laurén Drommerhausen, Chris Heagle, Zack Rose, Julie Siple, and Andrea Prevost have closed our beautiful home with great care and hospitality and generosity, embodying our grounding virtues even in this time of endings. The books on our majestic bookshelf have been lovingly packed and gratefully received by prisons; office supplies have gone to schools. They and our farther-flung colleagues — Tiffany Champion, Eddie Gonzales, Cameron Mussar, Gautam Srikishan, and Kayla Edwards — have also been producing the newest season of Poetry Unbound and joyfully completing the commitments we’d already planned for this fall.

I love and revere and am overwhelmed with gratitude for them all.

And fittingly, as I write, we're putting the final touches on a Thanksgiving offering to you. My interview with the mighty Joan Baez in Chicago last month was a delight, and it will be landing in the On Being podcast feed next Tuesday, November 26! She was funny and frank and wise, at 83, about her life and life in this world. And she has become quite a good poet. This is a conversation perfect for listening while cooking, I think. We’ll send a special email notice to you when it goes live on Tuesday. Some of us also just returned from a very moving event — “On Being Young in America” — in collaboration with the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues and Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. In the new year, we hope to share this and other things we've been doing with you.

I stay out in the world these days in part because being with real live human beings reminds me how brimful this troubled world of ours is with courage and social creativity and hope and moral beauty — right alongside all that vexes and terrifies. The wisdom that comes with “proximity,” as Bryan Stevenson always counsels, is more important now than ever. The lenses of news and social media that bombard us always in some way distance and dehumanize. Yet even as my country is as fractured as ever before, I do perceive between the cracks a tender waking up to the mysterious Other.

This newsletter every month around this time will be the place to know what I’m up to, what we’re up to, where events might be happening, when new episodes of On Being and Poetry Unbound drop (this December!), and more. And please do stay tuned for the further evolution of this work in which you, as a listener and reader and member of this web of community remain very much a part.

I send this with blessings for your presence in the thresholds of your life, and as always with love,

Krista

In the World

In a conversation taped live at the 2024 Bioneers Conference — How, Then, Might We Live?" — Krista joins friend and visionary Azita Ardakani for an intimate conversation that weaves through the embodied nature of wisdom, the art of living questions, and what it means to embrace uncertainty and tend to our distressed individual and global nervous systems.

Krista joins New York Times columnist and financial planner Carl Richards in an episode of 50 Fires: A Podcast About Money and Meaning. A personal, fascinating exploration of money as a prism for so much in our lives. 

Attend/Watch

"Sabbath Queen" screening and after-talk, New York City, Tuesday, November 26, 6:50 p.m. ET. Attend a powerful new documentary two decades in the making with former On Being guest, rabbi, former drag queen, and religious creative Amichai Lau Lavie. Krista will interview Amichai and director Sandi Buchowski afterwards. Tickets and more information here.

Reading Rilke Today. Online at The Poet's Corner, Sunday, December 8, 4-5:30 p.m. ET.  Krista and Padraig join wonderful new Rilke translator Mark S. Burrows for this popular annual event celebrating the poetry and luminosity of Rainer Maria Rilke.