Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 4 minutes ago
Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also former Poet Laureate of the United States.
From the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it “the whole of time.”
It is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She’s always known it — never lost it — and she beckons us to enter and relearn.
Journaling prompts for Session 6
Summon your 200-Year present. Take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and to the oldest person you remember holding you. Roughly calculate the year of their birth and the history that shaped their lifetime.
And who is the youngest person you have held in your arms most recently? Imagine a robust life for them — both the age and year to which they could live.
Try to inhabit this expanse of history that you have literally touched and been touched by. Can you feel in your body, in your imagination, a more spacious grasp of time itself and of possibility and agency? What difference might it make?
We’ve created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free (onbeing.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Journal-full.pdf).
Just beginning? Read our introduction for a possible way to organize your experience: onbeing.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-hope-portal
The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.
Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also former Poet Laureate of the United States.
From the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it “the whole of time.”
It is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She’s always known it — never lost it — and she beckons us to enter and relearn.
Journaling prompts for Session 6
Summon your 200-Year present. Take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and to the oldest person you remember holding you. Roughly calculate the year of their birth and the history that shaped their lifetime.
And who is the youngest person you have held in your arms most recently? Imagine a robust life for them — both the age and year to which they could live.
Try to inhabit this expanse of history that you have literally touched and been touched by. Can you feel in your body, in your imagination, a more spacious grasp of time itself and of possibility and agency? What difference might it make?
We’ve created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free (onbeing.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Journal-full.pdf).
Just beginning? Read our introduction for a possible way to organize your experience: onbeing.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-hope-portal
The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.
