Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

by Krista Tippett

that knows and knows that it knows.

Convenience is an illusion, merely shifting the burden of process and consequences.

By the way, there’s increasingly a direct connection between Brix levels and nutrient density, which is really interesting when you think about it and it makes sense to us. Of course, the best-flavored food would also be the healthiest and the most nutrient dense. And if we’re hardwired to go for that sugar and that flavor, we’re also going for the best nutrient density and, as it turns out, the best ecological decisions for a farm.

I’m drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent—forming in and through physicality and relational experience.

This suggests that we need our bodies to claim our souls.

Our bodies tell us the truth of life that our minds can deny: that we are in any moment as much about softness as fortitude.

To be alive is by definition messy, always leaning towards disorder and surprise. How we open or close to the reality that we never arrive at safe enduring stasis is the matter, the raw material, of wisdom.

For twenty years, he took the advice of therapists and physicians to create body-builder arms and forget his legs. Yoga helped him claim the whole of his body, and insist that he could be healed even if his legs couldn’t be cured. He’s become an innovator of adaptive yoga for people with disabilities, veterans, young women with anorexia. He says that he’s never known someone to become more at home in his or her own body, in all its flaws and its grace, without becoming more compassionate towards all of life. This is a wondrous statement, which somehow makes perfect sense.

As much as anything I’ve done as an adult, yoga has saved my life.

The apprehension of beauty, at the life-giving seam between what is sensory and spiritual,

a virtue that clarifies.

I first looked up and out—literally, that’s how I recall it—in Scotland, which I visited from Berlin at the age of twenty-five. I stepped off an airplane shrouded in layer upon layer of black, pencil thin, out of place. Scotland shocked me to attention with its angular edges, cascading hues of green and heather, and extraordinary light. It stilled me. It softened my confusion and my perpetual restlessness by dwarfing them, putting them in their place.

He insists that the key to the future of Islam lies in recovering its core moral value of beauty.

That night in Los Angeles, Rabbi Schulweis responded in kind, recalling the evocative Jewish biblical counterpart: “the beauty of Holiness.” This is a beauty of wholeness, he said—not just of forms and shapes but of relationships. It contradicts the fractionalizing force of religion—which after all was invented by human beings, not by God. We talked that evening about some of the bitterest issues in modern life: why religion paradoxically is at the heart of so much violence and war.

Beauty is about more rounded substantial becoming.

I also think of those unknown people who are the real heroes for me, who you never hear about, who hold out on frontiers of awful want and awful situations and manage somehow to go beyond the given impoverishments and offer gifts of possibility and imagination and seeing.

also always when I think of beauty think of music.

I love music. I think music is just it. I love poetry as well, of course, and I think of beauty in poetry. But music is what la...

Jacqueline Novogratz,

asks a question wherever she goes that she experiences to call forth inner abundance: what are you doing when you feel most beautiful?

Somewhere, the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value.

Aristotle makes a distinction between being admired and being loved. When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together. So really, the first meeting I had with people with disabilities, what touched me was their cry for relationship.

Not just in the context of disabilities, you’ve said the whole question is, how do we stand before pain? All kinds of pain and weakness are difficult for us as human beings. Why is that so excruciating? Why do we do such a bad job with it?

There are very strong words of Martin Luther King. His question was always, how is it that one group—the white group—can despise another group, which is the black group. And will it always be like this? Will we always be having an elite condemning or pushing down others that they consider not worthy? And he says something I find extremely beautiful and strong, that we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves.

You said somewhere that PTSD has opened the door to scientific investigation of the nature of human suffering. That’s a profound step, right? To me, that’s a spiritual way to talk about this field, with a profound understanding of what the word spiritual means. This field has opened up in two areas.

There’s a whole new field of interpersonal neurobiology that is studying how we are connected with each other and how a lack of connection, particularly early in life, has devastating consequences on the development of mind and brain.

There’s a sentence from your book in which you talk about your experience of clinical depression, “I had embraced a form of Christian faith devoted less to the experience of God than to abstractions about God, a fact that now baffles me: how did so many disembodied concepts emerge from a tradition whose central commitment is to ‘the Word become flesh’?”

It became for me a metaphor of the kind of community we need to extend to people who are suffering in this way, which is a community that is neither invasive of the mystery nor evasive of the suffering,

but is willing to hold people in a space—a sacred space of relationship—where somehow this person who is on the dark side of the moon can get a little confidence that they can come around to the other side.

I used to just chant all the time, “I feel therefore I am.” I’m in my body, therefore I can feel my existence. I feel the breath. I feel the living, breathing fiber that is humanness. This notion of objectivity—as if that were ever possible, as if the brain could somehow separate you from your subjective self—has created a level of dissociation on the planet.

Joanna Macy is best known as a Buddhist teacher and scholar, but I first discovered her as an exquisite translator of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

We’ve been treating the earth as if it were a supply house and a sewer. We’ve been grabbing, extracting resources from it for our cars and our hair dryers and our bombs, and we’ve been pouring the waste into it until it’s overflowing, but our earth is not a supply house and a sewer. It is our larger body.

Love is something we only master in moments.

And here is another, deeper carelessness, which I am absolving in a spirit of adventure: I come to understand that for most of my life, when I was looking for love, I was looking to be loved. In this, I am a prism of my world. I am a novice at love in all its fullness, a beginner. The intention to walk through the world practicing love across relationships and encounters feels like a great frontier.

As we take up the task of inventing common life for this century, we are struggling, collectively, with divisions of race and income and class that are not new but are freshly anguishing. Here’s what is new: a surfacing of grief. It’s not a universal reckoning, but it’s a widespread awareness that the healing stories we’ve told ourselves collectively are far less than complete. There’s a bewilderment in the American air—both frustrating and refreshing for its lack of answers.

We elected a black president, a multiracial president in fact, but we mostly talk about race when we acknowledge that we still don’t know how to talk about it. To be racist is not condoned, unthinkable for almost all of us within ourselves.

Race, john powell says, is like gravity, experienced by all, understood by few.

But it’s never been a quality some possess and others don’t—it’s as much about “whiteness” as about color.

Let’s just say it this way—it’s a way of taking up the language of the “beloved community,” which was the language and goal of Dr. King and John Lewis and all those people, and you use that language too.

And yet, we do have to have a beloved community, not in a small sense, but in the large sense. And I would even extend it beyond people, to a beloved relationship with the planet. And to live that, and to have structures that reflect that, is a very different way of ordering society.

In a healthy family or society, we do not just have the words that we’re related, we actually learn to care for each other, and we celebrate that.

One of the pieces that gets lost is that it’s as much about our stories as it is monetary. How could I leave you out if I’ve heard your story? I can’t.

We’re made to love one another. Strife and war are a deformity of that. But what we’re created for is to love one another and to love one another in community.

insight of John Paul Lederach, the haiku-writing, globally esteemed conflict resolution and transformation practitioner.

is a biological truth that safety is almost always a prerequisite for the best in us to emerge.

have been estranged from my father for several years. I am frightened to write the truth about the failure of this central love of my life in these pages. But it’s a failure that I must forgive, in myself and in him. Love doesn’t always work as we want it to, or look like something intimate and beautiful.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need. What if the mightiest word is love? Love beyond marital, filial, national, love that casts a widening pool of light, love with no need to pre-empt grievance. In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp, praise song for walking forward in that light.

Recently I had a conversation with the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, who said this striking thing—that he thinks moral imagination begins with universality and ends with particularity.

Your heart gets educated. I like that. Yes. We have to be educated by the other. My heart cannot be educated by myself. It can only come out of a relationship with others. And if we accept being educated by others, to let them explain to us what happens to them, and to let yourself be immersed in their world so that they can get into our world, then you begin to share something very deep.

You will never be the person in front of you, but you will have created what we call communion. I feel that that is the essence of life and that’s what Jesus came to teach us. Learn how to enter into communion with your neighbors—that’s what he called it, neighbors. And then you will discover something completely new.

this is how my intuition understands Jesus' nature