Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo.

She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muskogee Creek Nation,

and she's also former Poet Laureate of the United States.

She grew up in this state I grew up in, Oklahoma.

But we might as well have grown up in parallel universes.

Part of the rupture of our time for many of us is revisiting history we thought we knew.

Seeing in a whole new light places we thought we inhabited, and that is very much true of growing up in Oklahoma.

It's very much true of me that I have work to do for the rest of my life

to reconcile terrible stories I did not learn or did not hear, to take an unimaginable cruelty

and atrocity for which I must take some responsibility, also to take in beauty I didn't see.

So I grew up in a town called Shawnee, not knowing who Shawnee was.

Joy Harjo's ancestors landed in Tulsa, which was at the end of the Trail of Tears.

They were sent there after being forcibly removed from their homelands in the Deep South.

She has composed a glorious life out of very hard beginnings.

But 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, W-H-O-L-E. When she does that, she reminds me of Einstein, the way Einstein

reimagined the reality of time, which is quite

different from how we perceive it with our senses. Time, he reminded science, is not an arrow

moving forward. It is relative, not fixed. Seen at a deep level, it's not a compartmentalized past, present, and future.

Past, present, and future are all happening, interacting with each other all the time. And we actually

know this. We experience it constantly in our thoughts and in our hearts in our lives.

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