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principle and animating force for our lives. A powerful love that helps us live in sacred

relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world. Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

Underpinning all the great challenges of our time, there is the human drama, the human condition.

I find myself gravitating towards people who help us understand the puzzle of being ourselves,

of rising to our best capacities and gifts, in all of our complexity and strangeness.

Mary Catherine Bateson is the daughter of the great anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson,

and she's a linguist and anthropologist herself. She describes living as an improvisational art.

It feels at once wise and freeing to frame the challenge of living now in this way.

In a sense, human beings remain childlike. They're open to new learning and even very deep learning

that changes your personality really. Right through the life cycle, human beings remain playful

and play is a very important part of learning and experimental. You know, most other species,

they figure out how to be a rabbit or a chicken or an owl or a fish, and that's what they do for the rest of their life.

So learning is us.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on Beying. Mary Catherine Bateson is professor

Emerita at George Mason University. Her books include, With a Daughter's Eye, Composing a Life,

and Composing a Further Life, the Age of Active Wisdom. She grew up in multi-family households in

New York City and beyond. She now lives in New Hampshire with her husband in the same house they

bought together as graduate students in 1963. I spoke with her in 2015.

You know, I've read you across the years, I read Composing a Life and I read with a Daughter's

Eye years and years ago and then have been really intrigued by what you've been writing more recently.

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