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Where to turn to find my place of standing when it feels like the world is on fire?

This question surfaced in a public conversation I had just a couple of years ago with two poet contemplatives, Padregotumma and Marilyn Nelson.

They have both been quiet, vivid inspirations and teachers to me and to many.

Padregot bringing social healing, poetry and theology together, Marilyn, a lyrical excavator of stories that would rather stay hidden, yet as she coaxes them into the light, they lead us to new life.

It was a deep pleasure and a balm to sit with them together and you'll feel that.

What astonishes me in listening back is how this entire conversation becomes a reminder that the ruptures and unease and reckonings of what we call this moment.

And I'm as guilty as anyone of overusing that phrase. All of it was before us, before the pandemic.

Padregot and Marilyn's offerings are beyond wise and distinctly tender and powerful for this now.

So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble friends and build altars.

Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears.

Let's claw ourselves out from the graves we've dug. Let's lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around.

The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable and full of meaning.

O'Ramus, let us pray.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being. This conversation unfolded at the on being gathering at the 1440 Multiversity in Scotts Valley, California.

So Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland, grew up in a military family.

I love there's one place where you talk. I remember this. You tell me if I'm making this up.

When you and your sister, when you would move on to new places, because you moved around a lot, that you would imagine that the places you lived before didn't exist anymore.

Yes. I didn't. We didn't imagine. I believed it.

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