Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
In these next few sessions, we investigate some orientations and ways of being that are companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised to become stronger and more supple, these qualities might be thought of as fascia, or the tendons — complementary ligaments that make the whole viable and sustainable. The wonderful poet Naomi Shihab Nye is winsome and wise about how writing is a companion to life, and certainly a companion to hope, for her. And it’s a companion to the way we are investigating hope here: the calming simple act of writing things down.
Journaling prompts for Session 3
Exchange words with yourself — the many selves alive inside you — about what you’re doing here. What has hope meant in your life and in your world(s)? Do the different selves inside you have different orientations to despair and to imagination with real-world consequences? How about your best self?
During this week and in the following weeks, as it feels interesting, try this exercise proposed by Naomi. Land on a single word or phrase that you find animating in this Wisdom Practice, and “use it as as an oar that could get you through the days” — just by holding it in your mind (and heart) and seeing how it rubs against other words and how it meets experiences and other words. And remember Mary Oliver’s advice: Keep your journal close by at all times.
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.
In these next few sessions, we investigate some orientations and ways of being that are companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised to become stronger and more supple, these qualities might be thought of as fascia, or the tendons — complementary ligaments that make the whole viable and sustainable. The wonderful poet Naomi Shihab Nye is winsome and wise about how writing is a companion to life, and certainly a companion to hope, for her. And it’s a companion to the way we are investigating hope here: the calming simple act of writing things down.
Journaling prompts for Session 3
Exchange words with yourself — the many selves alive inside you — about what you’re doing here. What has hope meant in your life and in your world(s)? Do the different selves inside you have different orientations to despair and to imagination with real-world consequences? How about your best self?
During this week and in the following weeks, as it feels interesting, try this exercise proposed by Naomi. Land on a single word or phrase that you find animating in this Wisdom Practice, and “use it as as an oar that could get you through the days” — just by holding it in your mind (and heart) and seeing how it rubs against other words and how it meets experiences and other words. And remember Mary Oliver’s advice: Keep your journal close by at all times.
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.
![[Unedited] Latanya Sweeney with Krista Tippett](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Y9exAbF0wVY/mqdefault.jpg "[Unedited] Latanya Sweeney with Krista Tippett
You may not know Latanya Sweeneys name, but as much as any other single person — and with good humor and grace as well as brilliance — she has led on the frontier of our gradual understanding of how far from anonymous you and I are in almost any database we inhabit, and how far from neutral all the algorithms by which we increasingly navigate our lives.
In this conversation with Krista, she brings a helpful big-picture view to our lives with technology, seeing how far weve come — and not — since the advent of the internet, and setting that in the context of history both industrial and digital. She insists that we dont have to accept the harms of digital technology in order to reap its benefits — and she sees very clearly the work that will take. From where she sits, the new generative AI is in equal measure an exciting and alarming evolution. And she shares with us the questions she is asking, and how she and her students and the emerging field of Public Interest Technology might help us all make sense.
This is the second in what will be an ongoing occasional On Being episode to delve into and accompany our lives with this new technological revolution — training clear eyes on downsides and dangers while cultivating an attention to how we might elevate the new frontier of AI — and how, in fact, it might invite us more deeply into our humanity.
This interview is unedited and uses autogenerated closed captioning. You can find the edited and produced interview with music and full closed captioning in the On Being episode Latanya Sweeney — On Shaping Technology to Human Purpose. Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2W96Pt7OXc
Animation by: Neon Zoo, @weareneonzoo
ABOUT THE ON BEING PROJECT
An adventure in the mystery and the art of living
A home for shaping your presence in a tender, tumultuous world
A companion to the pleasure in thinking deeply with others
A calling to be part of the generative story of our time
THE PODCAST
Twenty years of culture-shifting classics: Mary Oliver, Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, and many many more. We can be found in ears, and in conversations that matter, around the world.
On Being with Krista Tippett: https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/
STAY CONNECTED
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The Pause Saturday email newsletter: https://onbeing.org/newsletter/
#KristaTippett #OnBeing #Podcast #Conversation #Technology #AI #Society #Purpose")
![[Extended] Clint Smith with Krista Tippett](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Z7cZhPLk09k/mqdefault.jpg "[Extended] Clint Smith with Krista Tippett
This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smiths writing: in the marrow of our bones. It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it.
Clint Smith is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed (@LittlebrownandCo) but he is first and foremost a poet. He and Krista discuss how his various life chapters have been real-world laboratories for him to investigate the entanglement between language and the intelligence of the body — and the related entanglement between history and place. His poetic sensibility has singularly opened readers to approach a generative reckoning with American history — on whatever side of that history our ancestors stood.
Clint Smith has a way of making reckoning possible at a humanizing, softening, bodily level — in the marrow, you might say, of our bones.
This interview is extended and uses autogenerated closed captioning. You can find the edited and produced interview with music and full closed captioning in the On Being episode Clint Smith — What We Know in the Marrow of Our Bones. Listen here: https://youtu.be/PmD9Stf2EY8
Animation by: Neon Zoo, @weareneonzoo
ABOUT THE ON BEING PROJECT
An adventure in the mystery and the art of living
A home for shaping your presence in a tender, tumultuous world
A companion to the pleasure in thinking deeply with others
A calling to be part of the generative story of our time
THE PODCAST
Twenty years of culture-shifting classics: Mary Oliver, Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, and many many more. We can be found in ears, and in conversations that matter, around the world.
On Being with Krista Tippett: https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/
STAY CONNECTED
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onbeing/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onbeing
The Pause Saturday email newsletter: https://onbeing.org/newsletter/")
