Hi Everyone and Happy Wednesday!
This is installment #2 — Podcast Wednesday — as promised last week in the blog and newsletter*. Every Wednesday I’m sharing a podcast with a great conversation/message/perspective for this pandemic time we’re in. (Monday is poetry and Friday is a book recommendation.)
On Being with Krista Tippet. Episode 817, Falling Together with Rebecca Solnit.
On Being is an organization that pursues “deep thinking and moral imagination, social courage and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together.” Check out their website. www.onbeing.org.
In this episode, host Tippet has a conversation with the great Rebecca Solnit. Solnit is a writer, historian, activist and (IMO) maverick thinker about our culture and our world. This interview took place in May 2016 but she could be talking about today and COVID-19.
Talking about disasters such as the 1989 San Francisco earthquake and Hurricane Katrina, Solnit says that when the world as we know it falls apart, people step up. Unlike the mythology promoted in popular culture — that in disasters, people’s worst, selfish, murderous selves emerge — what history tells us is that we actually find purpose, connection, and even joy in the middle of chaos, loss and fear. We tap into a collective life. And we find there, deeply in the present moment: hope. Hope as a spiritual concept, the unknown, the present moment, where something new can — and often does — emerge. Unexpected things will happen. Hope as life’s surprises.
Favorite quote from the interview:
“What if everything we’ve been told about human nature is wrong, and we’re actually very generous communitarian altruistic beings who are distorted by the system we’re in — but not made happy by it? What if we can actually BE better people in a better world?”
I hope you enjoy it, and find it as grounding and hopeful as I did.
Be well. Wash your hands. Stay connected.
Lisa
