Welcome to the Hope Portal

Prepare Inwardly, with Krista — Session 1

Illustration by Jesse Wang

Beginning today, and for the next six weeks in the On Being podcast feed and Substack, we’re opening a reflection/course experience curated by Krista and drawing upon her conversations with several visionary humans: adrienne maree brown, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Joy Harjo, Joanna Macy, and Ross Gay. Together, they extend rich and actionable invitations for a muscular, reality-based hope. They offer ways of seeing and living to lay our hands and our hearts, our imaginations and life force on the generative possibilities of life in this time.

Journaling Prompts for Session

Preparing inwardly after listening, ask these questions:

Right now, today, what is filling you with despair? And what is giving you hope?

What is hope? Answer this question through the story of your life.

Who have been the “live human signposts” of muscular hope in your life across time? Hold their faces and the qualities of their presence in your heart and in your mind’s eye in the days to come.

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.

A Possible Way to Organize This Experience

Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group.

For example, you could:

• Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful.

• Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow.

• Commit to some time journaling every day, even it’s just for a few minutes or a few words.

• Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune.

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.