A pastiche poem of tribute to the past and resolve for the possible.
Twenty years ago today, Krista Tippett birthed the life-force that is On Being. It began as a small local public radio show and ended up as a beloved podcast making lives all over the world infinitely more livable and luminous. President Barack Obama gave her the National Humanities Medal for it. Millions gave her their hearts as she gave us the universe of hers.
It is a landmark moment for On Being as it shape-shifts into its next incarnation, and for Krista as a human being moving through the stages of a human life.
To celebrate it, and to bow to the horizon of the next twenty years, I combed through the On Being archive to compose a twenty-line pastiche poem, made from the titles of episodes that have aired sometime in the past twenty years.
Here it is, with each line linking to the episode it came from:
TWENTY REASONS FOR BEING
notice the rage
notice the silence —
silence and the presence
of everything:small truths
and other surprises
what we nurture
how we live with loss
saved by the beauty of the worldseeking language
large enough
a life worthy of our breathwhen no question
seems big enough:this tiny slice of eternity —
mathematics, mystery,
and the universe —
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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