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About the Image
(photo: Hudson Gardner)
On the Road!
Clinton Global Initiative
Thursday, September 23
(9–10 a.m. Eastern)
Join our live video stream as Krista leads a plenary session at CGI in New York City. Industry leaders will discuss how technology can meet some of our greatest global challenges. Check out the list of participants!
» John Chambers, Cisco
» Jack Dorsey, Twitter
» Ory Okolloh, Ushahidi
» Zhengrong Shi, Suntech
» Ratan N. Tata, Tata Sons
Pertinent Posts from the On Being Blog
We take submissions!
 » Can Fear and Burning Unite?
Sometimes it takes the simple, kind words of a Somali woman to remind us of all to be treasured during these times.
 » Spirituality in the Congregation
A wonderful listener essay on recognizing the value of person-to-person exchanges as spiritual opportunity via Martin Buber's I-Thou.
» Martin Marty Swings and Connects
A good one. Martin Marty on Franklin Graham and Islam and violence.
 » Sweetness to the Rotten Core
Through Facebook, we received this listener's tale of a Rosh Hashanah gone bad gone good.
 » Happiness for Sale: $75,000
The elusive definition of happiness from a French Buddhist + an Indian economist.
 » Catching a Carp on Rosh Hashanah
Apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah? How about carp and gefilte fish and a storybook.
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Upcoming Broadcasts:
Journalism and Compassion
(September 23)
Can journalism be an art? New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has learned that reportage can deaden rather than awaken the consciousness, much less the hearts, of his readers. We talk with him about the wide ethical lens he's gained on human life in our time — both personal and global.
Transcripts
Words matter. We provide free transcripts for you to read and print.
» From Faith to Being
» Days of Awe
with Sharon Brous
» The Meaning of Intelligence with Mike Rose
» A Different Kind of Capitalism with Jacqueline Novogratz
Unheard Cuts
Hear what we left out of the program. Download mp3s of all of Krista's unedited interviews. Here are some of the latest:
» Sharon Brous
» Mike Rose
» Jacqueline Novogratz
» Bill McKibben
About Being
Hosted by Krista Tippett, the public radio program is heard weekly on radio stations around the country, bringing a wide range of intelligent religious ideas and voices into American life.
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This week on public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas:
A Wild Love for the World
For our first show as Being: Joanna Macy. She's a Buddhist philosopher of ecology and an exquisite translator of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. We take that poetry as a lens on her wisdom, at 81, on the great dramas of our time: ecological, political, and personal. Rilke sought the shape of meaning in a now-vanished central Europe at the turn of the last century. Joanna Macy's vision took shape in crucibles of the 20th century; she sees us at a pivotal moment in history — with possibilities of unraveling, or of creating a life-sustaining human society.
"Great Unravelings
and Great Turnings"
On my 40th birthday, nearly ten years ago, this radio program was much more a possibility than a reality, and I was in despair. I was encountering skepticism at every turn; nothing was working out. I was about to give up — certain that this adventure, however passionately I had believed in it, was coming to an end. But somehow a copy of Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows' translations of Rilke's Book of Hours fell into my hand. I still vividly remember my defeated mood as I opened it up and read this poem in a coffee shop:
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
—Rilke's Book of Hours, I, 59
After reading this poem (listen to Joanna Macy's recitation) for the first time those years ago, I began to breathe again. It cleared none of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles away. It simply gave me courage to keep moving forward, one foot in front of the other. This project might not work out, the dream might not come true, but I would see it through to the end.
So I made big shadows. I let beauty and terror happen to me. I learned a new universe of things about the seriousness of "the country they call life." And after years of starts and stops, this program made its way into that country too.
I've ever after been grateful to Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, not just to Rilke. I spent the early part of my adult life in Germany and had first read Rilke's poetry in his singular, inventive, lush German. Until I found Macy and Barrows' book, I didn't believe any translator could render him into English.
They even translate his sense of the urgency about his century to the urgency of the century that is ours. And it is a gift, and a joy, to hear Rilke's words in Joanna Macy's English and even more in her voice as she ponders what she has learned in 81 years bravely lived and deeply examined. She knew Cold War Europe and also post-colonial India. There, her husband ran the newly minted Peace Corps, and she came to work with Tibetan refugees fleeing their country, following the exile of the young Dalai Lama. She later became an environmental activist before that term entered our global lexicon, visiting ravaged Chernobyl, protesting the Three Mile Island catastrophe. She is a delightedly wise elder, a kind of voice I love to bring to the air. And in all of her experiences, she has also acquired a long view of time with regard to political, spiritual, and ecological realities.
In our conversation, for example, she says this of her early discoveries about environmental degradation. "I realized that we were, through technology, having consequences with our decisions … that reached into geological time. … That we are making choices that will affect whether beings thousands of generations from now will be able to be born sound of mind and body."
These days, Joanna Macy is best known as a Buddhist scholar and a philosopher of ecology. Her poetic sensibility and Buddhist savvy combine to give her a fresh and challenging take on our collective encounter with the environment now — an unfolding encounter that may define economics, cultures, and wars as well as ecology in the century ahead. Joanna Macy insists that we must embrace our passionate love for the world if we are to work with our grief at its unravelings and keep hope alive. She offers courage for the whole challenge of life and love in this present day.
It is so fitting and lovely that she should become our first show as Being.
I Recommend Reading:
Rilke's Book of Hours
&
In Praise of Mortality
translated by Joanna Macy
and Anita Barrows
These two translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry are among my most treasured reading. Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows have creatively captured Rilke's rich use of the German language and rendered his ideas into English better than any more literal translation I have seen. These poems nourish and challenge one to reflect on the innermost depths of oneself and the splendor of the natural world.
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