Support for on-being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build

the Spiritual Foundation for a loving world.

Fetzer's new study, what does spirituality mean to us?

Reveals how spirituality informs our understanding of ourselves and each other and inspires us

to take action for the common good.

Explore these findings and more at spiritualitystudy.org.

It's pretty intriguing to follow Naomi Shehapna's idea that most of us actually think

in poems, whether we know it or not, which she commends as a simple practice of writing,

explains the surprising power of what I know best from a long life of journaling.

The act of writing things down just helps.

As she says, it can be a tool to survive in hard times or to anchor our days, but also

to get into a more gracious community with ourselves, or rather with all of the selves

that live on in each of us at any given moment.

The child's self, your older self, your confused self, your self that makes a lot of mistakes.

Naomi Shehapna was long a self-professed, wandering poet.

Today, she's the young people's poet laureate of the Poetry Foundation, while also a professor

of creative writing at Texas State University.

In one poem, she wrote, called Kindness is held close by people around the world.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other

deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice catches the threat of all sorrows and you see the

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