New Suns
You may know that journalist and divinity scholar Krista Tippett’s weekly radio show On Being has come to a close after 20 years. The On Being Project will evolve into a podcast and other new, as-yet-unknown forms. Her final interview as a weekly radio show host is a heartbreaking, energizing, inspiring interview with the activist and writer adrienne maree brown. To me, Tippett’s choice to offer the On Being platform to brown is beautifully symbolic and indicative of Tippett’s own grace and sensitivity to the changing world around her. By inviting brown for these significant last words that are also the commencement toward a new chapter in her own work, Tippett trades retrospection and self-congratulation for generosity and futurity; she invites speculation and imagination to take the mic and makes space for a new generation of thinkers that brown exemplifies.
brown teaches in her theory of emergent strategy that transitions are always occurring, but their intensity and scale moderate. My experience of the world right now is that transitions of all scales are occurring at high intensity all at once, and it can be daunting to imagine stepping into the river and staying afloat. Tippett’s program is one I turn to when I need assurance and permission to make the difficult life choices that staying afloat requires, and brown’s writings have helped me navigate the outcomes of those life choices in ways that align with my values. I listened to the unedited version of Tippett’s interview with brown on a morning walk last week, and somewhere along the way, my whole being broke open, and tears flowed and flowed. In lieu of Dear CP and recs from the Ideas & Resources Doc this month, I invite you to listen to this amazing interview that includes brown’s eminently calm, reasonable, and invigorating perspective on our many, sometimes overwhelming collective (and personal) transitions:
“…[if] we are aware, if we wake up, we are in a place where we can create so much history and so much change. Everything is falling apart, but also, new things are possible. Octavia [Butler] said that “[t]here’s nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns.” We are in a time of new suns. We’re in a time of new suns. We have no idea what we could be, but everything that we have been is falling apart. So it’s time to change. And we can be mindful about that. That’s exciting.”
Till next time…
