Monday Whatevers
Monday, March 21, 2022
Hello, Friend!
It’s Monday, so… inspired by on one of my favorite bits of the Bible, let’s start every week off with a little bit of whatever’s good and noble in the world. Here are a few excellent and noteworthy things I’m seeing in the world right now. Some are beautiful, promising, and reassuring. Some are poignant, thought-provoking, and necessary. All of them add to a greater knowing of God’s presence in this world, within our humanity, and out in the great beyond. And, they all prove there’s an abundance of spectacular, breathtaking tangible and intangible cosmic matter between us.
Please feel free to share in the comments whatever is good that you’re seeing in the world as well.
Blessings,
Marcie
March is National Women’s History Month—and I would like to continue celebrating women with our Monday Whatever list.
One of my very favorite podcasts is On Being with Krista Tippets. This week I want to share conversation she had with women that I feel were true, honest, just, pure, lovely, gracious, excellent, and worthy of praise. I hope you will pick at least one if not all to inspire and encourage you throughout your week. I know that I will begin revisiting each of these conversations throughout the week and gleaning them for messages of hope.
For each listing I included a snippet of On Being’s beautiful commentary about each episode.
Peace.
Wise and Phenomenal Women featured On Being with Krista Tippets
Grace Lee Boggs: A Century in the World
Chinese-American philosopher and civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs turned 100 this summer. She has been at the heart and soul of a largely hidden story inside Detroit’s evolution from economic collapse to rebirth. We traveled in 2011 to meet her and her community of joyful, passionate people reimagining work, food, and the very meaning of humanity. They have lessons for us all. —On Being
Eve Ensler: The Body After Cancer
Eve Ensler has helped women all over the world tell the stories of their lives through the stories of their bodies. Her play, “The Vagina Monologues,” has become a global force in the face of violence against women and girls. But she herself also had a violent childhood. And it turns out that she, like so many Western women, was obsessed by her body and yet not inhabiting it without even knowing she wasn’t inhabiting her body — until she got cancer. —On Being
Nikki Giovanni: ’We Go Forward With a Sanity and a Love’
It feels good and right this week to sit with the beloved writer Nikki Giovanni’s signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She’s also a professor at Virginia Tech, where she brought beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there. And she’s an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to us all — at home in her body and in the world of her lifetime even while she sees and delights in the beyond of it. —On Being
Mary Oliver: Listening to the World
Amid the harshness of life, Mary Oliver found redemption in the natural world and in beautiful, precise language. Oliver, who died in 2019, was one of the most beloved poets of modern times. She sat with Krista for a rare, intimate conversation in 2015. —On Being
Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Intelligence of Plants
As a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer joins science’s ability to “polish the art of seeing” with her personal, civilizational lineage of listening to plant life and heeding the languages of the natural world. She’s an expert in moss — a bryologist — who describes mosses as the “coral reefs of the forest.” And she says that as our knowledge about plant life unfolds, human vocabulary and imaginations must adapt. —On Being
Tracy K. Smith: love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak
Tracy K. Smith has a deep interest in “the kind of silence that yields clarity” and “the way our voices sound when we dip below the decibel level of politics.” She’s a welcome voice on the little leaps of the imagination that can restore us. She’s spent the past year traversing our country, listening for all of this and drawing it forth as the U.S. Poet Laureate. Krista spoke with her at the invitation of New York’s B’nai Jeshurun synagogue, which has been in communal exploration on creating a just and redeemed social fabric. —On Being
Jill Tarter: ’It Takes a Cosmos to Make a Human’
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — or SETI — goes beyond hunting for E.T. and habitable planets. Scientists in the field are using telescopes and satellites looking for signs of outright civilizational intelligence. One of the founding pioneers in this search is astronomer Jill Tarter. She is a co-founder of the SETI Institute and was an inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact, based on the novel by Carl Sagan. To speak with Tarter is to begin to grasp the creative majesty of SETI and what’s relevant now in the ancient question: “Are we alone in the universe?” —On Being
Isabel Wilkerson: This History is Long; This History Is Deep
Go to the doctor and they won’t begin to treat you without taking your history — and not just yours, but that of your parents and grandparents before you. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson points this out as she reflects on her epic work of narrative nonfiction, The Warmth of Other Suns. She’s immersed herself in the stories of the Great Migration, the movement of six million African Americans to northern U.S. cities in the 20th century. The book is a carrier of histories and truths that help make sense of human and social challenges at the heart of our life together now. —On Being
Priya Parker: Remaking Gathering: Entering the Mess, Crossing the Thresholds
Priya Parker has become the voice of what it means to gather in this world we inhabit now. She is helping remake the “how” of coming together — and more importantly, the “why.” Long before the pandemic, she points out, we had fallen into rote forms for staff meetings, birthday parties, conferences, shared meals. Virtual or physical, this time of regathering offers a threshold we can decide to cross with imagination, purpose, and joy. This is a conversation with so much to walk away from and put immediately into practice. —On Being
Esther Perel: The Erotic Is an Antidote to Death
The psychotherapist Esther Perel has changed our discourse about sexuality and coupledom with her TED talks, her books, and her podcast, Where Should We Begin? Episode after episode lays bare the theater of relationship, which is also the drama of being human. Her insights speak to the flip side of social isolation — the intense experience many have now had of togetherness. And her deep understanding of “erotic intelligence” feels so interesting as we grapple with emergent dynamics of the human condition writ large — coupled or not, and both intimate and societal. —On Being
Claudia Rankine: How Can I Say This So We Can Stay in This Car Together?
The poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine says every conversation about race doesn’t need to be about racism. But she says all of us — and especially white people — need to find a way to talk about it, even when it gets uncomfortable. Her bestselling book, Citizen: An American Lyric, catalogued the painful daily experiences of lived racism for people of color. Claudia models how it’s possible to bring that reality into the open — not to fight, but to draw closer. And she shows how we can do this with everyone, from our intimate friends to strangers on airplanes. —On Being
Eula Biss: Talking About Whiteness
You can’t think about something if you can’t talk about it, says Eula Biss. The writer helpfully opens up lived words and ideas like complacence, guilt, and opportunity hoarding for an urgent reckoning with whiteness. This conversation was inspired by her 2015 essay in The New York Times, White Debt. —On Being
Imani Perry: More Beautiful
James Baldwin said, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” Imani Perry embodies that prism. For the past few years, Perry has been pondering the notions of slow work and resistant joy as she writes about what it means to raise her two black sons — as a thinker and writer at the intersection of law, race, culture, and literature. This live conversation was recorded at the Chautauqua Institution. —On Being
Mayfair Yang: China’s Hidden Spiritual Landscape
A filmmaker and scholar gives us a parallel story to the ubiquitous news of China’s economy and politics. Mayfair Yang discusses the ancient and reemerging traditions of reverence and ritual — revealing background to its approach to Tibet. And, she tells us how China gleaned some of its recent dismissive attitudes towards religion from the West. —On Being
Michelle Alexander: Who We Want to Become: Beyond the New Jim Crow
The civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander is one of the people who is waking us up to history we don’t remember, and structures most of us can’t fathom intending to create. She calls the punitive culture that has emerged the “new Jim Crow,” and is making it visible in the name of a fierce hope and belief in our collective capacity to engender the transformation to which this moment is calling. —On Being
Frances Kissling: What Is Good in the Position of the Other
“If there isn’t the crack in the middle where there’s some people on both sides who absolutely refuse to see the other as evil, this is going to continue.”
The focus of our national fight over abortion may change, but this hasn’t changed for decades: we collapse this most intimate and complex of human dilemmas to two sides. We’ve been looking yet again for wisdom away from the turbulent news cycle and keep returning to this conversation Krista had with Frances Kissling. She is a “bridge person” in the abortion debate: a long-time pro-choice activist who has sought to come into relationship with her political opposites. Now she’s controversial on both sides, but speaks from a place that many of us would like to map out between the poles. She has experienced something more powerful, as she tells it, than defining common ground — and this has lessons for other issues in our common life and our struggles with people with whom we disagree the most. —On Being
Ruby Sales: Where Does It Hurt?
Civil rights legend Ruby Sales learned to ask “Where does it hurt?” because it’s a question that drives to the heart of the matter — and a question we scarcely know how to ask in public life now. Sales says we must be as clear about what we love as about what we hate if we want to make change. And even as she unsettles some of what we think we know about the force of religion in civil rights history, she names a “spiritual crisis of white America” as a calling of today. —On Being
May your week be filled with whatever is true, honest, just, pure, lovely, gracious, excellent, and worthy of praise.
Much Peace,
Marcie, BCWWF
A treasure trove!
I can't wait to dig in! ❤