Finding Faith in Our Future (Krista Tippett)

Listen now (52 mins) | “You're going to find a lot of people doing their best, revealing how beautiful and strange we are, and how remarkable we can be..."

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Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a National Humanities Medalist, and a New York Times bestselling author. Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve drawn so much inspiration from Krista’s work at On Being over the years. She has thoughtfully interviewed so many luminaries during her career in public radio and podcasting, and many of those conversations have stuck with me, deeply. It was an honor to get to interview her today.

We talk about where Krista finds herself in this current chapter of her life: Engaged, she says, in a way that feels right for now. Listening in different ways, and enjoying life more.

We reflect on how much has changed since she began her public radio path in the late 90s. And she answers questions about where we might put our attention now, and how that shapes our presence in the world, and who we want to be. She talks about what’s life-giving, calming, and connecting to orient around. And who she believes are amazing social creatives—like, for example, first-grade teachers.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

So nice to be with you. I was listening to your conversation with Bon Iver and the beginning. You use music so beautifully, and as I was listening to your introduction, I found myself getting teary eyed and I was like, I miss Krista, right when I feel like we needed so much of you. You've retreated.

KRISTA:

Yeah, well, we're doing a season now and I'm just more out in the world just where I feel like I want to be.

ELISE:

I get it. I understand. And yet I feel like you probably have a mournful audience like me that needs a little bit of a ballast every week from you, but that's okay. I understand. And to be fair, I go back into your archive and repository all the time because if there's someone interesting who has been doing interesting work in the world for a minute, chances are you interviewed them first and sometimes you're the only one.

KRISTA:

Well, I always tried to look for people who weren't necessarily above the radar because a lot of the really interesting people, really wise people, they're just doing whatever they're doing and they're not out on social or branding.

ELISE:

Yeah. I want to talk to you about all of that. I mean, one person is Robin Wal Kimer, and I feel like you might be one of the only people on the planet who she's sat with for a conversation.

KRISTA:

Oh really?

ELISE:

Yes. She doesn't do press. Really. I've tried for six years, I think

KRISTA:

It was quite a while ago.

ELISE:

Yeah.

KRISTA:

Are you enjoying doing this?

ELISE:

Yeah, so I co-hosted the goop podcast and I had been interested in podcasting for a long time. I mean, you've obviously been doing it forever. And I was an NPR kid, that's all my parents listened to when I was a kid and we lived outside of town and so on the drives to and from, it was NPR. And so I've just always loved audio and when I started hosting that show, I don't know you well enough to say, oh, I'm similar to you, but there's something about introverts and audio that is so deeply meaningful to sit in this corner and talk to people is Chef's Kiss for me. I can't imagine doing anything else and it's source material for everything that I write. It's an incredible honor really to be able to convince the most interesting minds in the world to give you 45 minutes of time.

Yeah. And there's something about audio too and cutting through, particularly in this moment that we're in, which is so visual and so connected to just land in people's minds. I'm sure you've had that experience. It's a felt experience rather than a visual experience.

KRISTA:

And visuals, they're so loud to our minds. They grab, they take all the energy and they take some energy away. I mean, I know you can do visuals well, but I think a lot of times it takes energy away from thinking and actually really taking the words and ideas

ELISE:

And it's a distraction and then you become, do you like how this person looks and what's happening with their expression? And yeah, I don't like it. So I know you've been out in the world, but do you feel in this moment, in this chapter of your life less engaged or do you actually strangely feel more engaged?

KRISTA:

I feel like I am engaged in a way that feels right for now, but the thing is what I'm not doing is I don't have a full-time production team and a staff to manage in an organization to run and therefore money to raise. So I actually have more attention span. I don't have the same kind of production capacity, but I'm listening in other ways and I'm also just enjoying life more. And that feels important right now too. We're staying sane and just for the stage of life that I'm

ELISE:

At, and this is a big question that I have and people ask me, this is really good medicine for me to actually talk to you and be reminded and having come out of a big organization to just being me mostly with some freelance help in the corner of my room, people are always asking, are you going to go? I mean I've been doing this for almost five years by myself, but are you going to go and do something grander or bigger? And I don't know that I have the vibration to manage that or that that's the best use of my energy at this point, as compelling as it feels. But I really also like that you are now going back through your archive and editing what already exists for people because it's there. There's so much that you've done for us. And then focus on more and new I think is sometimes a fool's errand when actually we have what we need. You've given it to us.

KRISTA:

The Bon Iver one was new we are doing, but it's more collecting, being out, collecting things and then putting them out. And it's not maximizing the algorithm, right, because the algorithm wants you to be doing a regular basis and as much as possible, and I just can't and won't do that. So I just have to trust the universe that it will find its way where it wants to be and should be in which ears. Yeah, Krista,

ELISE:

All right, let's talk about that. You said I won't, and this must be so interesting. I mean, you have been doing this since what, 2003? Is that when your radio show first started?

KRISTA:

Yeah, well, the truth is I started fighting to get on the air because it's so interesting now, especially when I talk to younger people who really cannot comprehend having had to go through a gatekeeper to put audio out in the world because when I had this idea really in the late nineties, you had to go through a big platform. I mean, we didn't, whether you're in a platform, a big legacy institution, and it was, it was years of piloting and persuading. And then in 2003, that's when I'd done enough of that and also raised the money to go weekly on public radio, which is really the only way you show up on public radio is 52 weeks a year.

ELISE:

Yeah, wild. That's wild that it's been a calling for so long. And yes, in some ways I really miss that day. I worked in magazines for a long time, and so I remember the days too of legacy. This is in a totally different space, but I gave a lot of style bloggers their very first press feature, which is so funny and was cognizant of the fact these guys are taking our, this is happening and there will no longer be a one way mediation of here are the trends and here's the content and I'm going to feed you and there's no conversation. And as much as I celebrated that now it's like, can we get some more gatekeepers please? I know

KRISTA:

It's such a wild west, it's so chaotic and overwhelming and I feel like podcasting is in an in-between place now. I feel like the way it's working now has got to yield something a little bit more ordered and a little bit more

ELISE:

Manageable. What do you imagine when you put on your prophetic hat and tap into your intuition and think about this moment, and I'm curious about how you hold this moment that we're in. What do you think that looks like for people

KRISTA:

In podcasting

ELISE:

Or just the consumption of all of this

KRISTA:

And

ELISE:

The junk food diet that we're all on?

KRISTA:

What

ELISE:

Do you think happens?

KRISTA:

I do have a sense that a lot of people are moving to control that junk food diet. I mean stepping away altogether from kind of news and information, but also trying to be more discerning really. I mean, we should think of it almost as nourishment. What we put in our bodies is what our health is and what we put in our ears is creating neural networks or destroying them. It's shaping who we are. I know this isn't true for everyone. And of course we also know that these, and this is a big problem in our world right now, is that these media and these platforms have been designed to be addictive and everybody can't resist that. And of course one worries about younger people, although I think in some ways people for whom this stuff landed in midlife had the least resistance to it. I see young people coming up who are growing up with it or my kids who are in their twenties, they're just developing some instincts to be smart, to be savvy about it.

But I think that this question of what we consume and really what we're talking about is what we attend to, where we give this precious thing of our attention really matters, and it matters in this world, not just in terms of the information we're looking for, but what we're taking in terms of how we are shaping our presence in the world. And because there's a lot we can take in now that will just send us into a stress and fear place, and that has very immediate tangible consequences on our ability to be present and to get grounded in a time when it's very difficult to feel grounded. I'm going to say I think this is obviously a practical discipline, but it's really a spiritual discipline. It's really about having some agency over who I want to be and what I want to be paying attention to, and therefore what I want to be shaping me and what I want to be orienting around if we, if it feels like it's a responsibility to pay attention to things that are disturbing important that we do that in the right spirit and in a measured way. Because if all we focus on is what we're fearful about or upset about, the danger is that we still kind of warp ourselves around it. So how do we in a time this also orient around what is going to be life giving? What is going to help us stay calm? What is going to help us stay connected?

ELISE:

I think that's beautifully said, and I think too, this idea that you're out in the world more and being present or sensing into what's actually present and is a good practice for all of this. And I find more and more as people are asking, how are you? I'm like, on which level? Because in my daily life and my kids are younger than yours, they're eight and 12, everything's wonderful. Really, I am I working to create and resurrect more joy in my life and it's wonderful. And then on a collective level, it's not wonderful. And yet learning how to hold those two and not let the one infect the other or think that I don't care about what's happening in the world has I think been good discipline. I feel like we've all gotten a big lesson in in the last decade, right?

KRISTA:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there's also this weird phenomenon that I actually think this may be kind of a new thing for our species. So literally a new experience that we're trying to learn how to metabolize, which is having this constant access to this fire hose of images and experiences that are very far, far away and shocking and both meaningful to my life and far away what's happening in Washington DC today. So yeah, I think we all have to know what our work is to do and where it's important for us to pay our attention and not check out necessarily, although that may be a perfectly reasonable path for a lot of people. I think that needs to be an option. But the truth is when people say to me these days, well, where should I look or what should I be paying attention to feel better to get some hope?

I think the answer to that is almost always going to be close. Really look around in the place you live in, right at your children, at actual humans and how they behave and how they treat each other and how they're working with substances and places and communities that you can actually see in touch. And you're going to find, I really believe this is true. I really believe this is true anyway, you're going to find a lot of people doing their best revealing how beautiful and strange we are and how remarkable we can be. I mean, just last week my partner and I went to a music festival and I would just like to recommend that to everyone in the world just to spend four days in this world right now just soaking up music. And it's not that just the music itself was so nourishing and beautiful, but watching human beings play all these bizarre instruments that we play and make these sounds and collaborate, watching jazz musicians collaborate in these miraculous ways just to be reminded of how amazing we are. And that is still true even with the real hardness now and seeing kind of the opposite being displayed, not rising to their best, right?

ELISE:

I think that I heard this from you or a guest on your show. Tell me if not, but that when we think of this wider collective spiritual frame that God or the universe is expressed through music, mythology and math. Have you said that or am I making this up?

KRISTA:

I don't think so, but I like it.

ELISE:

Yeah. Maybe it was one of the physicists that you had on, but it feels like it's your frame, right? This convergence of spirituality and science, this larger paradigm and which this all and the different languages that we use to express what's present feels core on being. But when you think about this transitional time, this period of I go to Richard Rohr and the wisdom pattern and that we are in the middle of disorder to hopefully reorder or abandoning one snail shell in pursuit of another, and it's terrifying to be so naked and exposed, but we need a bigger home. I don't know. How do you hold this moment in time with the way that you understand God or the universe? It's a big question.

KRISTA:

Yeah. Well, it is. I think about it on two levels, and one is yes, this is an extraordinary time to be alive and unfortunately extraordinary and it's a frightening time. There's a lot breaking. There's a lot breaking suddenly that hasn't been working for a long time. I really believe that we came into this century with most of our institutions for basic things, not really working anymore. Schools and healthcare and the law and politics. It's not like they've been just functioning fantastically. We were going to have to reinvent them and COVID then having the pandemic accelerated that. And in a way, because there's such rapid change and metamorphosis, it's hard to think back to, I don't know, 2018 or 2019, and just knowing that even though it would've been unimaginable then that we would stop going to the office every day, that there was so much wrong with institutional life.

It wasn't what we needed it to be it. So I'm not saying, and everything that's happened since then is not human-centric either, but those forms were not fit for purpose and and I think we're in one of these times in history where we can just see very clearly what doesn't work, but we're the generation that is going to have to make up the new forms. And so that is both really stressful and of course perilous for people who are on the losing side of all this rapid change. And there's a lot of that. There are a lot of sharp edges to all this breaking, and it's easy to say also if you're standing on solid ground, but if you can step back from it and say, I mean, I think about our children, it is also in some sense a magnificent time to be a generation that has to reinvent the basic forms for some people depending on how they're wired.

This is such a creative period. But I think to say that in a much more manageable or way close to home when so much is breaking, there is a lot being born. But I think the question a lot of us are asking is how to see that amidst the breakage and what is my work to do? What can I be a midwife to? What I'm looking for these days are, I think social creatives, and I think first grade teachers are some of the most amazing social creatives. So every field, any discipline you can think of, you have people working in forms that don't quite make sense. So they're working with really imperfect materials and they are figuring out a way to make it new. So that is true. And the thing that makes our generation of our species different is that we truly have this existential threat, which is the ecological crisis that our planet is truly in distress from the way we've been living for a long time.

And at a cellular level, the way I think about what's happening now is that I think we have at a stress nervous system at a species level and everything that is just haywire and feeling out of control and insane from elections to wars, to the mental health crisis to violence that we are just gusting ourselves to. These are all symptoms of our bodies in distress. And I think we actually, and I really think the young more even than those of us of later generations are just feeling at a cellular level that our planet, our natural world is in distress and we're part of, it actually feels kind of logical to me that when the weather is going haywire at a fundamental level, politics is going to go haywire. So that's my lens on things, and it comes out of these 25 years of the kinds of questions I've been asking. And so I'm asking how can we directly address the human condition if all these other things that we spend so much time seriously analyzing are symptoms of the human condition on the loose and our fear response understandably on the loose.

ELISE:

Yeah, that's one of the most vital questions I tend to think in systems and see patterns and try and make things cohere across different worlds. How does the micro reflecting the macro, we know this too, exactly what you were saying. When it gets hotter, people get more violent. There's actual correlations between weather and behavior, even on a basic biological level. But I agree, and it's a symptom I think of the feminine, the sort of divine feminine, and each and every one of us being repressed and we're getting lashed in some way, and it feels like it's pushing us to a point of, I don't know, there's collective waking up that's happening. It feels that way, in part to what you were saying earlier, actually, the only thing I can control here is the way that I respond to the world. So what are my inputs?

What am I letting into my personal ecosystem? And then how is that then informing the wider ecosystem? Am I powering peace and love or am I powering anger and hatred? I don't know. So I feel like we're being woken up to the fact that we are at some sort of control panel maybe. And to your point, what you were saying, which was so beautiful about the creative, the people who are revisioning and remaking the world, that's what calms my fear. I think everyone, I wake up and I'm like, am I the only one who, ah, I got to do everything, Krista, and then I'm like, oh my God, look at these lawyers. Look at these teachers. Whoa, all these people doing all this stuff to take care of us and build this new house.

KRISTA:

Yeah,

ELISE:

It's a lot

KRISTA:

Though. It's a lot. No, and I think one of the paradoxical things about now is, and this gets at some of the things you've been doing and talking about for a long time as well, is everything is urgent. There's so much that is existential or feels existential, but taking care of ourselves is not optional. Getting rested, letting ourselves fall apart when that's necessary, finding ways to care for our health and our resilience and our connectedness to other people, our relationships, because this is the rest of our lives. I grew up in this world where people thought in terms of three year strategic plans, and so worked on five year plans, and any time it was ridiculous then, but now it is part of what brought us to this, but these callings before us, all of these crises and what they call us to and the healing we need to do in our country and in our world, this is here for the rest of our lifetimes. And so if that's true and this is a marathon, then staying well is part of the path. Paradoxically.

ELISE:

Yeah, I was just writing in my newsletter, there's this wonderful man named Mark Horne who does cabal tarot readings, and he would laugh and say he's the only person who's lectured at the International Tarot Confederation and the Jewish Theological Institute, Mark Horn, $125. You will love it. You bring a question, he can help you form it. He does the Sephirot and he tells you stories, and interprets Kabalistically, and he was telling me how the Pentacles, it used to be the coins, and then when they redid the deck, they added the pentagram to illustrate that the spiritual and material are together and their two sides of the same coin. It's the impossibility of the dualistic mind and people who are like, this is not spiritual. This is material. I think that's also one of the crises that's unfolding and an opportunity for all of us. This is big work for me down to money's not spiritual, money's based, or I need to do all this work over here so that I can do this work, which I hold in different esteem and regard. I mean, you ran a nonprofit and also the body to what you were saying, it's like, oh, well, I want to be up here in my mind or out there in an expanded understanding of the world and the body doesn't matter, the material doesn't matter, and yes, it does. We are embodied. We are here to have this experience and to have pleasure and joy and to take care of ourselves and not as an afterthought or not as a superficiality, but as the way to actually connect more deeply with life, which is exactly what you're doing out in the real world right now too. Not a disembodied voice anymore, Krista,

KRISTA:

Right? Yeah. Oh man. I hand off to a new generation. I feel that it's not like there's a void. It's a rhythm of life.

ELISE:

It is a rhythm of life. I would say as someone who sees you as a model and archetype in this space, that it feels like if we're in a spiritual battle, we're losing it to the broadcasters. But that's okay. I understand you're serving in other places. Okay. Speaking of the material too, instead of this obsession with longevity and not dying, can we just focus on the life that's present here and maybe

KRISTA:

Depthness, I feel like this is all connected, right? The Longevity mania is really about the fact that there's not a sense of how to give this life meaning. It's just this crazy, it's extend it, but I think it's because there's a confusion about what to fill it with.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, I'm a James Hollis fanatic, and I'm reading, he's written 17 books, so I can read James Hollis and I can read Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, and I can read all of these people forever and never be done. But thinking about one of his core motifs, and this is shared amongst a lot of those people who also look at men and the lives of men, so many of us spend the first half of our lives building these towers, and then we realize there's no meaning in the tower. And I think what we're seeing in our culture particularly is the tower is crumbling around us collectively. You got to figure out how to go out and find the meaning and harvest the meaning. Meanwhile, I think it's how do I just build another tower? I'm just going to keep tower building because finding the meaning is a terrifying journey for sure.

KRISTA:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and in that world that I grew up in, it was really demoted for generations have only trained ourselves to be productive and to perform. And we get a lot of training in what is presentational, and you were supposed to in your private time, figure out the spiritual stuff and this inner work. And I'm really conscious now too that in these same decades where everything has become existential and inside out, the religious communities that people used to just grow up in, they used to just be inherited, and they might not have been wonderful, but at least they gave you so things to work with and even something to reject. But if you rejected it, you kind of had an idea about how to look for something else. And so you suddenly have these places where without needing to seek it out, people had some moral formation and some ritual and some spiritual text and some experience of praying and some experience of a community hopefully that had something to do with service and this sense of this cosmic narrative that you were part of. And that has just gone away. And really this is a new development in the history of our species, young humans growing up without any exposure to that. So I think that's also significant in that picture. I totally, I think the way you just described it is exactly right, but it used to be a little bit more automatic where you turned, or at least you knew where to turn first once you got serious about the inner work. And it's very unnatural for people to have to figure this out or make it up.

ELISE:

I think that that loss, that loss of the collective quote, the story, and even if yes, we're missing it, the dwindling of churches, although I know there are certain megachurches that are more formidable than ever, but the loss of that collective story. And I think in many ways the loss of the myth of our culture as we've started to rightly re-litigate history and say, well, wait, who's story is this? And who's the narrator and who's included and not included? And all of that is very vital and essential as we renegotiate who we are and try and arrive at something bigger. And yet it's a cacophony of voice. It's very disturbing to a lot of people to have to reimagine that and very difficult work. And when I think about what you were talking about, this lack of institutions of faith holding people in a container, people are still, you might know the statistic, but at the rate at which people say that they're people of faith or that they're spiritual, but not religious is massive. But I don't know that we have a coherent story over here either. Maybe we do.

KRISTA:

Yeah. Well, I actually think if what you looked at was do people say they believe in God, even if they're not sure what that means or that they pray that they sometimes pray, that has continued to be most people. What's gone away is the profession of religious affiliation with a denomination, with a specific tradition. I think that that though has leveled out, and I actually feel like I was saying earlier, all the forms that we inherited, including religious organizations, weren't really fit for purpose in this 21st century. And religious institutions, I think haven't been necessarily representing what they were born to represent. And so the critique of them is valid. And what I see new generations doing in a way that this is a big generalization, but I think has more substance in depth than I think we were seeing in the height of the new age in the eighties.

I see fewer people dabbling. I mean, I see people reaching for spiritual nurture and perhaps going on a retreat or picking up a practice, but I also see people wanting to be of service, wanting to have community that has some depth to it. I think those are the original impulses wanting to ask these questions of why are we here and how should I be spending my life and doing that in conversation and kind of companionship with others. So I think the core of these places that used to be in our midst is in some ways being resurrected. But outside the institution, and this is another thing I'm really paying attention to now, and well get involved in as it feels like there's something to get involved in, it's how do we honor the integrity of the great traditions, which really are the repositories of us thinking not just about who God is, but what it means to be human across time.

And with a lot of just these containers for huge amounts of ritual and art and wisdom teaching and role modeling and what you could call spiritual technologies. So how to honor that and also see how can they offer up what they have to the world in a more direct way without necessarily, and I think in different forms, the structure of it being a closed system and you have to be a member, there will be some things for which that's probably true. But I remember talking to some rabbis during pandemic, and somehow we were talking about rituals of lamentation, and I was just saying, we need rituals. We need collective rituals of lamentation right now. And they said originally when some of these rituals arose, they weren't something that was done inside the synagogue. They were for the community. And I think there's a lot of it that actually in its depths is meant to be for the community or in service of the world. And that to me feels like an exciting thing that could open up in the time ahead.

ELISE:

That's so beautiful, Krista. And thinking of the way, and I didn't grow up in a religious institution and the way that you did, I was an observer from afar, but this idea of applied spirituality or again, going to the spiritual and the material belong together, and instead of this being a place or club that you belong to and you go on Sundays, how do you spill it into the horizontal? How do we apply it every day? And I think maybe we're seeing more of that unless I go there and I get absolved, and then I go out and I do bad things in the world, and then I go and get absolved. And in a way, there's some sort of return. I think about someone like Jesus who had 12 followers and was roaming around the desert. He didn't have a church. He wasn't in the temple. He wasn't part of the synagogue, and

KRISTA:

He was a nice boy. Let's be clear.

ELISE:

He was a nice dude. He was a ram. Yeah, exactly. He spoke Aramaic. Yeah. And he was not asking for the Vatican. That wasn't the impulse. And so the more it comes out into the world, as much as I think we still need those stories, maybe it's for the best, even though it feels a little discordant or disorganized or not so coherent.

KRISTA:

Yeah. Were you raised in any tradition at all?

ELISE:

Well, my father's Jewish and I grew up in Missoula, Montana, and I went to Jewish, my mom's calls herself a recovering Catholic. She felt very, very persecuted and some family, not niceness from being part of Catholicism and stuff that happened to her sisters, et cetera. And so she is intolerant really of any organized religion. But my father is a South African Jew, and it was important to him that we were raised with some association with Judaism. And so we had this female rabbi, I don't know how frequently she came, maybe once a month they flew her in. There weren't that many of us, maybe 50, a hundred people. And we did services in a Methodist church, and I was on all the plays. But then at some point, I think I went to boarding school and then I went to college and someone said to me, oh, you're not really Jewish because your mom's not Jewish. I took that in very deeply as being an imposter in the faith. And now I have a lot of friends who are rabbis and they're like, you're Jewish. It's good. You're Jewish. Shows up in my 23 and me profile, that's for sure. And then I really, through death, through mediumship, was introduced to this idea that there's more here. And then that has been my backdoor into having a lot of faith and Mary Magdalene really, which then made me really become interested in Jesus.

So I don't know what I am, Krista. I'm interested in it all, but I also don't have any affiliation. So I feel no specific loyalty. And I think it's given me a lot of freedom to also recognize, well, everyone, it's all part of the same wisdom tradition, and they all have the same route. But I'm sure I drive people crazy too. Cafeteria religion.

KRISTA:

Well, yes, but I think what you just kind of modeled is what I'm talking about because you're right, they're part of the same wisdom tradition. They're certainly part of the same impulses in us, but I think we probably need all the particularity, all the very specific kinds of rituals and understandings and characters to even approach collectively what it is we are talking about and what you just described of how you came to this and the person of Mary Magdalene. And I mean, there's specificity to that, which is quite beautiful. It's not just, I'll take a little Christianity today.

ELISE:

No,

KRISTA:

I think there's integrity to it. I really do. Thank

ELISE:

You. Thank you. And I will say in recent years, I feel the pull of my ancestry, the undeniable reality of who

KRISTA:

I come from. And I feel that in you too. I feel that you're, yeah, and

ELISE:

That's

KRISTA:

Such a gift, right? That's the thing. If you have that, my life partner now is Jewish and he's the son of a rabbi, and we're observing Shabbat and I have always lived with Shabbat envy. I have just thought if I knew those songs, if I had that ritual in me, of course theoretically anyone could do it. But it's meaningful. It's meaningful in the context of a community and a life where these things we're just absorbed. And I'm so grateful to be with this person who has all of that and to be able to partake in it.

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ELISE:

I think there's a real longing, and as someone who we didn't observe everything, and it was only when I was a child, and it's interesting, my son is going to a Jewish middle school next year, and he has never been to Temple and he knows nothing. He's going to be taking Hebrew. It's a thing, Krista, I was emailing the person who took care of us on the admissions team, and I was like, do I need to get him a tutor? What do I do here? Because I could feel my own anxiety and imposter syndrome about not being Jewish enough. I was transferring it on to him, and I was like, he's not going to know anything. And she was like, he's fine. And he's not the only one. And there are kids who are not Jewish who come to the school, take a deep breath, we've got this.

KRISTA:

I think you're giving him such a gift. I really do.

ELISE:

Oh, thank you. I think so too.

KRISTA:

And

ELISE:

I think we all long for that, right? Particularly in this country that indigeneity or where do I come from and what am I part of? And I think it's a huge, huge core wound for people that maybe isn't so recognized.

KRISTA:

It

ELISE:

Comes out in strange ways, right?

KRISTA:

Yeah.

ELISE:

We all came from somewhere. We're all indigenous somewhere, right?

KRISTA:

Yeah. And I think until not very long ago, and again, our memories don't stretch to this, people just were born with touch points to that. However immersed their family were, there were touch points. Whether it was the congregation or the extended family, there's a lot that got lost in the nuclear family and people, extended families kind of falling apart for different reasons. And this American ethos is sending your children thousands of miles away, which is so unnatural. And the demise of the institutions. I just think even in previous generations when people became refugees or did have to or choose to move far, far away, they could land with their people probably in a religious institution, but not necessarily. And that in this world has dispersed and we've really lost something without understanding that we were losing it.

ELISE:

I think it's so profound. Did you ever interview Pauline Boss?

KRISTA:

Yes. Yeah. Did you know she was my neighbor in St. Paul?

ELISE:

Shut up.

KRISTA:

No, really? She's one. I just saw her. She was in New York recently. I moved to New York. I don't know if you know that. Oh, you did? Yeah. But Pauline and her late husband, her amazing late husband, Dudley Riggs were my neighbors. They lived down the street from me in my house that I still own in St. Paul. And so she became a great friend, and then eventually I did interview her and I interviewed her again during pandemic when that whole idea of ambiguous loss, it's so alive. But you're right. This is another example of this.

ELISE:

And talk about naming something that for people who don't know Pauline or haven't, I've interviewed her, Christ has interviewed her, but this idea,

KRISTA:

I love even interviewed her.

ELISE:

Yeah. Oh yeah. Love

KRISTA:

Her.

ELISE:

But naming and most present for people, it was people who died in nine 11 and they never recovered the bodies. But she also writes about it in her original research is about homesickness or prisoners of war when there's no closure. And so many of us

KRISTA:

Dementia, it's like this incremental death. But you can never, it's unresolved and it's ongoing.

ELISE:

And I think we all are holding so much ambiguous loss that has no name, that's just even haunting our psyches in terms of who we are and where we came from and where our people, in some ways, social media professes to solve that by giving people community. But I think it's kind of a saccharine version.

KRISTA:

Yeah, that's a good way to say it. I think sometimes there is an ethos to creating community, high functioning community, and there are things human beings know how to do, right? Extending hospitality is this superpower. And you find forms of that with lots of detail in every culture, I think. And it's something you can do with strangers and even people you disagree with. But it's really, I think a social technology of honoring the creatureliness of other humans and creating a space where you invite other people, even if you don't know them, to bring their best selves into the room and you're bringing your best self into the room and you're meeting each other as human beings. And if I think about the ethos of the internet, it's really like the ethos of the vacant lot. You just sling it wide. And then you have the bullies have this outsize power and the good people are there, but they're huddling in the corner kind of holding it together. And that's really unfortunate that I still remember when this idea of the connection economy and that these platforms with us, but the quality of connection matters. We know that in life, if the quality isn't there, it's not necessarily a good thing.

ELISE:

Yeah. Oh no. And the idea of the vacant lot and the bullies, but it distorts our perception, I think of the world when you see what's happening online and then you go out and being from Montana and going home is such good medicine for me because I'm with people who don't vote like I do. And I can remind myself, oh, these are good. I love these people. These are good people. Their perception of harm is different than mine, but we are coherent on most things and

KRISTA:

People are good and people in real life. It circles back to where we were a minute ago. In real life, even if people don't agree or don't know somebody else or very different, generally they don't stand up on a table and shout somebody's name across the room and tell 'em how stupid they are, which Is the way people behave in that digital sphere. And I do worry about, yeah, as you say, people, younger people who spend so much time on this platform is generalizing about humanity. That's not who we are. It's not how we have to be. But you only have to step away from the screen, step outside to see that.

ELISE:

Well, Krista, I hope I see you in real life. Now that I know that you are in New York, I might make you have lunch with me when I get out there. And thank you for all that you've done for us. And I recognize as much as I always want more, because that is a modern malady too, that you've given us so much and it's still there. It's a great honor to dip into your archive and it's such vital medicine. Thank you.

KRISTA:

We do have a new little season now, and also we're doing something for six weeks, which is a little teachable, moments drawn from the archive. It's an experiment. It's not really a podcast. It's little 13 minute things, once a week for seven weeks that you can listen to and you can listen with others and their journal prompts and things. So I'm excited about that. And I would just want to say this has been great and I feel very good passing off the torch to you, Elise, really, I love the way you're thinking and reading, questioning. So this has been good for me today.

ELISE:

Oh, Krista, thank you. I appreciate that. More than you can know. Did Krista Tippett just say that she feels good passing the torch to me. Oh my God, I love Krista. There's something. And the show that they produce is so beautiful, has such a high quality, it just truly can bring me to tears. And some of the conversations that she's had are just in soldered into my mind as transformative and have shifted me in the way she has a big part, I think, of the way that I see the world, including her deep reverence for science. She's interviewed so many mathematicians and physicists, and sometimes those conversations go over my head and I can't quite keep up. And yet I love the expansiveness of her mind, the ongoing questions that she's entertained throughout her life and career. And she is a big expander for me in terms of the life that I am living and hope to continue to live.

It's funny. It's like I desperately want on being to sort of keep a regular cadence of episode drops. And yet I am inspired by her commitment to herself and to being physically in the world. And she is bringing us episodes. There's one that just released with Bonnie there. That's really beautiful conversation. Alright, my mind aspiring I inspiring. I got to go take some notes. Friends, if you like today's episode, there are several ways to support the show. I produce it myself, so this helps me to continue to make it. First, please rate and review the show on the platform where you listen and consider sharing this episode with a friend. That's how it grows. It is so helpful. Second, please support my sponsors who make this show possible. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, you can email me at admin [at] eliseloehnen.com.