Krista Speaks, Kate Tweets (from Cleveland)
Trent Gilliss, Online Editor
Our host and managing producer are on the road again — this time at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland for a partnered event with WKSU. And, with her fully-charged iPhone in hand, Kate picked up where she left off in Miami and established herself as the live event Twitter aficionado for SOF (follow us @SOFtweets). Here’s the transcript from last night’s Twitterstream:
KM: On the ground Cleveland. How can how we converse with each other & listen affect outcomes in our hurting cities?
9:02 PM Apr 28thGray day in Cleveland. http://twitpic.com/47lyd Tonight at Trinity Cathedral here Krista will talk about what faith brings to the struggle.
about 16 hours agoKMoos for SoFTweets. Krista presents tonight at Cleveland Trinity Cathedral. Thanks to Very Reverend Tracey Lind. Live tweets at 7:30 EDT.
about 8 hours agoKM here @Trinity. Standing by. http://twitpic.com/48q3i
about 6 hours agoKrista about to begin. Standby.
about 6 hours agoJon Kabat Zinn cautioned against technology. KT sez “I’m wearing a lot of it tonight.” (laughter)
about 6 hours agoKT:Early days of show, could it be true public radio listeners like the rest of the world cared about religion?
about 6 hours agoKrista quoted Peter Berger: Religion is a private matter that shld be kept between consenting adults.
about 6 hours agoTracey, the Dean, brings Krista to the assembled. http://twitpic.com/48rg6
about 6 hours agoThat last was a nonconsecutive tweet. Just checking to see if y’all are paying attention.
about 6 hours agoA car alarm right outside that had been blaring for the first fiveminutes is silenced. KT sighs gratefully and thanks the silence. Laughs.
about 6 hours agoSchizoid tweets: I am retweetimg me tweeting as SoF. Krista sez ask yrself a big question & answer it thru the story of your life.
about 6 hours agoTweeps if you have any questions for Krista send them now and I’ll see if there is room to fit them in.
about 6 hours ago@brainwise Thanks! You are paying attention! Gold star!
about 6 hours agoThere at least 400 people here. I’ll get a shot for you in a moment. Beeeoooteefull space. Built when Cleveland had streets of gold.
about 6 hours agoHard to capture a decent angle. http://twitpic.com/48tl2
about 6 hours agoImportance of being in relationship to engage our pain and our fear so that we can make something happen. Rough paraphrase of David Hilfiker
about 6 hours agoRobi Damelin Palestinian whose brother was shot by a sniper is quoted saying “There is a difference between being honest and being right.”
about 5 hours agoSearching for solutions we can’t yet see. Now KT taking questions.
about 5 hours agoKrista of course immediately mentions Battlestar Gallactica first chance she gets.
about 5 hours agoFavorite guests? List includes Thick Nhat Hanh, Wangari Maathai, and Jean Vanier.
about 5 hours agoQuestion about social networks gets mention of our “briliant” online editor Trent Gilliss who is from North Dakota! Bwah!
about 5 hours ago@MarcoAnders So glad you enjoyed it!
about 5 hours agoWhat questions should we ask now in econ crisis? KT sez: Who will we be to each other now?
about 5 hours agoSoF does immense amount of research to locate the right voice.
about 5 hours agoIf someone is going to be inflammatory there are a lot of shows they can be on. (Big laughter.)
about 5 hours ago@lance_agena I haven’t caved yet but it’s only a matter of time.
about 5 hours agoIs your work Tikkun Olan? KT: I’m a journalist. We’re not holding an agenda. But the show has a large impact.
about 5 hours agoWe forgive our children 400 times a day, brain science tells us it’s something our brains evolved to do. Praphraseof Mike McCullough.
about 5 hours agoBig applause let the balloons go bring out the clowns and the elephants and thanks to everyone that’s our show from Cleveland. Good night!
about 5 hours agoAutographing books. http://twitpic.com/48x8j
about 5 hours ago
Krista’s next event is a barn burner — a live conversation with Joshua DuBois, Obama’s head of faith-based initiatives, from the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown Saint Paul. We’ll be streaming live video and asking you to watch and comment and tweet about it. Tell us if you’d like to participate and we’ll send you reminders and details as the time nears. If you’d like to just watch, that’s groovy too!
Twittering Krista in Miami
Trent Gilliss, Online Editor
Over these past five years, I’ve been utterly charmed with the effort that’s put into producing a weekly national program. We’ve been making great commitments to reveal this part of the process through releasing Krista’s unedited interviews, videotaping editorial sessions and face-to-face interviews, and blogging about the correspondence we have among our staff and the ideas that inform our roles.
But, commitments require Krista (and sometimes staff) to speak at public and private events — ranging from speaking engagements at our funders’ board meetings to lectures at local public radio stations’ fundraising events. These forums can be quite inspirational and enlightening, revealing another aspect of Speaking of Faith’s mission to reach larger and more varied audiences.
My goal is to share more of this side of Krista and Speaking of Faith with you. One way to do this: put our managing producer’s iPhone to work. A savvy news person, to be sure, Kate’s also a poet and quite a wit — an exquisite match for Twitter (follow us @SOFtweets). She acceded to my request and so began the experimentation while Krista, at the invite of WLRN, spoke at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Miami:
I’ll be retweeting our managing producer’s Twitter fiesta from Krista’s event at Trinity in Miami tonight. Doing some catch-up now.
7:19 PM Apr 23rd from webRT @katemoos In the Green Room eating Sun Chips. That is not a product placement. http://twitpic.com/3uw9v
7:20 PM Apr 23rd from webRT @katemoos Miamians v. friendly plus equip seems to work. Winning combination! Plus warm here.
7:20 PM Apr 23rd from webRT @katemoos Am told Miami audinces come late. Don’t fret. I’ll manage my little punctual problem. Cuticles. Joke.
7:20 PM Apr 23rd from webRT @katemoos Krista and Mabel. Mabel makes everything work. http://twitpic.com/3uy30
7:21 PM Apr 23rd from webRT our senior producer @mitchhanley @katemoos Glad to hear the equipment is working. How’s the turnout?
7:22 PM Apr 23rd from webRT @katemoos @mitchhanley Little hard to say but 400?
7:22 PM Apr 23rd from webRT @katemoos Krista sites Parker Palmer. To let the soul speak one must create quiet, trustworthy spaces.
7:23 PM Apr 23rd from webRT @katemoos @mitchhanley Sorry that was a typo. 300?
7:23 PM Apr 23rd from webRT @katemoos I am a drop in the ocean. But I am also the ocean. Larry Ward
7:24 PM Apr 23rd from web@katemoos is on a roll. She was hesitant to commit to too much for Krista’s event tonight. Parker Palmer, Larry Ward, and Sun Chips Kate? :)
7:26 PM Apr 23rd from webRT-1 @katemoos questioner here asks Krista to account for that Scottish singer.
7:28 PM Apr 23rd from webRT-2 @katemoos KT’s theory on that is short. But she applauds intimacy of radio. Sound.
7:28 PM Apr 23rd from webRT @katemoos Iphone battery death! GBye dear Tweets! From Miami, Katy Lou signing off.
7:31 PM Apr 23rd from webOh no! @katemoos is down. Any stealth twitter junkies in the Cathedral?!
7:32 PM Apr 23rd from web@lance_agena Oh, back-ups, back-ups, back-ups. We always prepare for Krista but how about behind the curtains. I will or I’ll retweet if so.
7:38 PM Apr 23rd from web in reply to lance_agenaOne final RT from our dear @katemoos: BTW anyone calls me KatyLou and I will find you and make you pay. Finito!
7:39 PM Apr 23rd from web
Well, we’ll be doing more of our regular twitter conversation. Next week Krista speaks in Cleveland, using her new format.
7:42 PM Apr 23rd from webWe’ll be sure to have @katemoos working the scene and we’ll give you a heads-up.
7:53 PM Apr 23rd from webAnd, if you haven’t heard, Krista has a live public event on May 20th with Obama’s head of faith-based initiatives, Joshua DuBois!
7:56 PM Apr 23rd from web
Kate will be tweeting from Cleveland this Thursday and we’ll be doing more of these in the coming weeks — including Krista’s live conversation with Joshua DuBois, Obama’s head of faith-based initiatives — so please give us your feedback. We’re still finding our voice(s) and style for this format.
Repossessing Virtue: Rachel Naomi Remen and Economic Crisis as Spiritual Journey
» download(mp3, 23:20)
Kate Moos, Managing Producer
Rachel Naomi Remen spoke to Krista for a program we called “Listening Generously” some time ago and re-aired recently. In it they discuss the power of story to heal and restore, as well as the power of story, or narrative, to limit and to harm. So I wasn’t surprised when, in the course of this brief interview with me, she said “our story had become too small,” and asserted that finding our way back to the largeness of our collective story was part of the spiritual path we are on, as we navigate the economic crisis.
I hardly edited this conversation at all because I was so taken by Dr. Remen’s hospitality and warmth, and I wanted to share that with you. I hope you’ll let yourself sink into her wisdom on the spiritual aspects of our shared anxieties and ask yourself, as she suggests: What do I trust? What do I really need?
We’ll keep releasing mp3s of our interviews via this blog, our podcast, and now on a Web site for Repossessing Virtue. And, please share your ideas about how this downturn has affected you in terms of personal conscience and values?
Repossessing Virtue: Esther Sternberg on the Economic Crisis in Biological Terms
» download (mp3, 12:28)
Trent Gilliss, Online Editor
Esther Sternberg is a scientist’s scientist. And that, I believe, is what appeals to so many of us who listen to “Stress and the Balance Within.” But, it’s not the only thing. She has a way of taking objective data, verifying and analyzing it, and rendering her report. And then what makes her such a special and effective voice is her incredible ability to relate these scientific points on a personal level, often by looking inward and exposing the frailty of her own humanity.
Take, for instance, Kate’s interview with her on the economic crisis. Kate’s first question: “Do you consider this a moral or spiritual crisis?” Almost immediately, she says that she doesn’t see it in either term because she doesn’t know enough about the causes of the crises (i.e., she doesn’t have the data to make judgments, pronouncements). Rather she sees the crises in biological terms.
She could have left it at that and then talked at length about empirical data and scientific evidence. But, she rarely does. She references people and its impact on others — and then she relates by remembering her father, a Holocaust survivor who would read Psalm 23, her own anxieties about the downturn, the need for public service.
We’re releasing all of these mp3s for download in our podcast. And, check back here at SOF Observed for future conversations with wise thinkers, including Greg Epstein, Pankaj Mishra, and Shane Claiborne.
Also, we’re looking to our readers and listeners for fresh thinking and language about how to talk about the current economic crisis. How has this changed you, your family, your community? And not just financially, but in terms of personal conscience and values? We’d like to hear from you. Tell us your first person story about your experiences.
Vissi D’Arte and the Other Guy from Chicago
Kate Moos, Managing Producer
Our program with the recently passed-on Studs Terkel is being rebroadcast this week. If this show doesn’t make you cry, there is just plain something wrong with you. Of course the man is the patron saint of every good thing in radio broadcasting, so we have a special love and a license for sentimentality when it comes to Studs. I actually had him autograph a baseball for me once.
In any case, at one compelling moment in this week’s show which I won’t describe here, we play a piece of the great aria from Tosca, “Vissi D’Arte,” and hearing it sent me hungrily off to YouTube to find a complete version. This one, performed by Leontyne Price in the 1960s, gave me some real joy today, and made me miss the intellect of a man who could wander so easily from Mahalia Jackson to Bertrand Russel to Puccini.
A Poet of Love & Hate & Forgiveness & Revenge
by Kate Moos, managing producer
Marie Howe’s new book, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, is an amazing addition to our vocabulary of love and hate, forgiveness and revenge. As the poet Tom Sleigh says, “Her language is always deeply rooted in the social world, and it never turns away from the most difficult moral problems.” In this book, her poems about the war within us between light and shadow, vision and violence, are sometimes terrifying, often funny, and always illuminating.
After the Movie
My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a daywhen you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the murderous
heart.I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?We’re walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear
my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say to
him.Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone
you want to eat and not eat them.Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.
Meister Eckhart says that as long as we love any image we are doomed to live
in purgatory.Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just bought—again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from
the hole the flip top made.What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict. You are a nun.”Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things of
me even if he’s not thinking them?Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,we both know the winter has only begun.
Our program “Getting Revenge and Forgiveness” is available here at speakingoffaith.org beginning Thursday, November 6th. Share your stories.
(Poem reprinted with permission of the author.)
Confessions of a Yoga Convert
Krista Tippett, Host
Kate got me into yoga — coming in day after day last fall glowing from Bikram. Bikram was too hot for me, literally, but I discovered “Core Power” soon after and was hooked. And grateful. Kate is thinking of posting a photo of herself in corpse pose. It doesn’t occur to me to do something like that, as I am incredibly word-centric. And that is part of the reason yoga is fantastically healing for me. I came off a long stretch of years of writing my book where I was desperate for a break from the thoughts in my head. Yoga has taken me out of my head. Rather, more accurately, it has helped me center myself, including the thoughts in my head, in my body. This is a relief, practically a whole new life.
As I’ve grown into this practice, I’ve experienced other intriguing epiphanies. About six months in on a very regular routine, I experienced a surge of energy. This was nearly overwhelming for a few weeks; I was sleeping several hours less than normal and waking up energized. It was as though yoga had unblocked or tapped more energy than my metabolism knew what to do with. And after about a month, that stabilized, settled down. I also went through a period a few months in of a deep, visceral, unnamable sadness. I’ve written in my book and done radio about my history of clinical depression; and for someone who has struggled with depression, sadness can be scary. But this felt natural and safe somehow. The scary part was that it eluded words and conscious analysis; I could not think it through. As it was arising in my body, I sensed it would have to work its way out of my body. And it did. I do speak about this with Seane Corn in our interview, something I’d been looking forward to.
There’s a lot of talk in yoga about taking the practice “off the mat” — letting its lessons infuse daily life. I didn’t notice this immediately, and the ways I find it happening now are quite mundane. But they’re still powerful; they are reordering some of the ways I approach what is mundane. So, for example, I’ve always been driven and goal-oriented. But in flow yoga, every transition is as important as every finished pose; and grace in transitions is as important as getting the final poses right. Somewhat to my surprise, I find that I’m able (sometimes, not all the time!) to spend more time and care on graceful transitioning and processing as on final products in other parts of my life. This is liberating — it’s like I’ve been missing whole stages of experience, at an ordinary level, all my life.
Finally, I also see the deepest lessons of yoga taking hold on me as I go lighter rather than harder on myself as I in fact become more advanced. This is perhaps the first passionate endeavor in my life in which I am absolutely content that I don’t have to be great or best or always better. I take as much pleasure in slow poses as in fast; I cut myself slack when I’m tired or distracted. I let messy, inconsistent life be what it is. I learn to delight in my body just as it is, at 47. And this does somehow translate into being easier on everything and everyone else around me. For a lifelong perfectionistic over-achiever, this is a seismic step forward into wisdom. I’m amazed to find this practice helping me literally embody many of the great spiritual teachings of my own faith and those that inspire me in others. So I’m grateful to Kate, and grateful to all the sages and practitioners who kept this spiritual technology alive for something like 5,000 years so that I and other 21st-century mortals could discover it when we need it most.
Rounding Out a Fine Month of Poetry
Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Production Intern
Kate posted a poem a while back that, she said, bonked her on the head. Robinson Jeffers, nature poet of the Central Coast in California, wrote this one that never fails to make me gasp. As the snows linger on in Minnesota, it also makes me a little homesick for the grandeur of the Pacific.
Editorial Note June 12, 2008: “The Great Explosion” is reprinted on many sites on the internet. In deference to copyright, the text has been removed from this post and a link to the text provided above. (Kate Moos, Managing Editor)
(photo: “Carmel Valley” by Mike Disharoon/flickr)
