A quick note about something I came across that may be of interest. I’m in the habit of listening to podcasts to fall asleep, and last night a new episode from the spiritually-engaged show “On Being” came across my feed. (They no longer produce episodes weekly, but if you’ve ever listened to NPR early on a Sunday morning, you likely have heard it or its predecessor “Speaking of Faith” and would recognize host Krista Tippett’s voice.) They have just started a seven-week experiment of 15-minute episodes called “Hope Portal,” which looks like it will weave a few of the show’s past interviews into an exploration of hope as it might be employed at this point in 2025.
The speakers will “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.” Tippett emphasizes that she’ll be presenting not a blind but a “reality-based” hope, one that does not ignore the grimness of our time (but that does reject that things have to be that way). While at one point in the first episode Tippett indicates that she’s speaking to Americans, the show so far is not specific about the reasons why we might be lacking in hope these days, and so seems to allow space for non-Americans too.
“On Being” has frequently featured conversations with poets, and is so engaged with poetry that they have a page that gives you a poetry-focused entry into their project. For “Hope Portal” specifically, four of the six thinkers featured are poets: Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Joy Harjo, and Ross Gay (along with environmental activist and Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy and Black feminist writer adrienne maree brown). It looks like the episode featuring Nye is called “Write Things Down,” and the project offers PDF pages of an accompanying journal that you’re encouraged to print out and complete by hand (completely free to download, no email required). So clearly, though it’s not a poetry course, this project has the potential to be a place where poets can feel very much at home.
Finally, if you prefer to read rather than listen, the show puts out professional, human-edited transcripts.
Time feels scarce these days (as you may have guessed given the time that has past since you last received a newsletter from me or saw or a new blog post), but I’ll be seeing if I can set aside some time to listen to the episodes and do the accompanying prompts. (One that’s particularly mind-blowing involves (to simplify it) thinking of the earliest-born person you can remember and the history that shaped their life, and then thinking of the youngest person you’ve come across most recently and thinking about what you wish for them.) From our conversations in Writing Together, it’s clear that hope is something a lot of us are craving. If you end up engaging with the series too, feel free to drop me a note about your experience! And if you come across this post months later, I expect it will still be there.
Have something to say? Please feel free to drop a note in the comments. Comments are usually held for moderation, so don’t worry if yours doesn’t appear right away.