Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath

On being with Christa Tippett is supported in part by the Fetzer Institute, helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Fetzer's sharing spiritual heritage report asks, "How will we reimagine our spiritual infrastructure for today's time? Learn more at Fetzer.org." I interviewed the wise and wonderful writer Ocean Vong on March 8, 2020 in a joyful, crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. A state of emergency had just been declared in New York around a new virus, but none of us guessed that within a handful of days such an event would become unimaginable. So for me, this conversation has become a last memory before the world shifted on its axis. What's most stunning is how exquisitely this conversation speaks to the world we have since come to inhabit. It's heartbreak, it's poetry, and it's possibilities of both destroying and saving. I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on being. It's such an honor to be invited to be part of the honor of Fetzer and to do a show here. I'm really excited. I love this room. I love the energy in it that you all are bringing. And yeah, what an honor and a delight to be up here with Ocean Vong. Who I want to describe as a writer and wise person who at a young age has made a singular contribution to American letters as a writer of poetry and essays in this novel that you may have heard of. The word gorgeous that occurs in the title on earth, we're briefly gorgeous, is a word that's also often used to describe your writing and your voice, your literary voice. And also, you know, Ocean, I want to say, I am aware that when people write about you and introduce you and describe you, they often speak about how your work is shaped by themes of violence and survival. In the context of the immigrant experience, in the context of life and displacement in the aftermath of war, in the context of growing up age in American and queer in the society. And that is true, and we're going to talk about violence, but I'd also say that the sweep of your work is about bearing witness to the other side of violence and the possibility of joy while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness to the fullness of what has been carried and what has been survived. So, let's start. Oh, did I didn't mention that you're a MacArthur genius. I have no proof. You were born in Saigon and when you were two years old in 1990, your family came to the US. You know, I have this question that I ask at the beginning of most of my conversations and inquiry about the religious or spiritual background of someone's childhood, however they would define that now. I just, I wonder how you, if there are aspects of your childhood to which you would attach that language of spiritual religious? Yeah, my family is traditionally Buddhist, but they were also illiterate and so they, the extent of their Buddhism were rooted in rituals and care. And so, you know, every day before school, my mother would get me to the altar and we would start to name this sort of a roll call that people in our family and try to bless them and think about them and tend to them and to ourselves. And so spirituality began with care rooted in physical bodies. It didn't extend beyond the household. There was no mythical presence to it. It was very, it was almost like this abracadabra that we did before we stepped out of the house into the rest of the world and there by the rest of America. And I think for me, it's still, whatever my mother presented to me, those early mornings in front of the altar, it's still true. And I think I embrace that in everything I do, writing, sitting with you now, how do I do it with care? And even in the temples, in many Asian-American households, when you enter the house, you take off your shoes. No, we're not obsessed with cleanliness any more than anyone else. But the act is an act of respect. I'm going to take off my shoes to enter something important. I'm going to give you my best self. And I think even consciously, when I read or give lectures or when I teach, I lower my voice. I want to make my words deliberate. I want to enter, I want to take off the shoes of my voice so that I can enter a place with care so that I can do the work that I need to do. In a number of places, you'd tell the story also about a Baptist church in your neighborhood that you would visit on Sundays, partly because they had ice cream. But also that you became really taken with the story of Noah's Ark in a way that says a lot about how you approach your heart and your life. Yeah, I think that myth, I would go to a sleepover friend's house. I grew up in Hartford, a predominantly black and brown neighborhood. And the next morning, my friends would give me their clothes, their church clothes, and we would just go. So I would end up attending, throughout my childhood, hundreds of church services in the Baptist church. And the preacher kept talking about Noah's Ark. And I was so infatuated. I think it embedded into my psyche in really everything that I do, even to this day. You know, what an incredible myth does to work and live by, which is that when the apocalypse comes, what will you put into the vessel for the future? It's also such an image of it's preparing for the apocalypse and getting beyond it, which is also an experience that many people have, even in our world right now, it's an immigrant experience, a migrant experience as we've started to call it. Getting ready to interview you made me ponder also the particular strangeness and singularity of what it is to be Vietnamese American. Your family, and in your case, your family was not just fleeing a war and in the aftermath of war and surviving that, but it was our war, right? Your Vietnamese American and both sides of that equation were at war. And you were literally born because of that war. Your mother was the daughter of an American soldier who fell in love with a Vietnamese girl, and then the whole family was blasted apart just as the country was blasted apart. Yeah. It's a strange epic, you know. Yeah. You wrote somewhere, no bombs equals no family equals no me yikes. Yeah, yeah. Yikes, dude. You know, what do we do? But I think it's also a question integral to our species. And you know, this, this, this Michigan foreign boy, my grandfather, went to Vietnam to play the trumpet. You know, he was trying to escape his domineering father who didn't allow him to go to music school. So a 19 year old kid thinking as teenagers do, well, I'll go to war and play a trumpet. You know, and so when he met my grandmother and they married, he was going to stay there. Yeah. He was going to stay in Vietnam and have a new life. And then Saigon fell. So I'm a product of war. But I think so much of American life is a product of war. Yeah. You know, we're standing on stolen ground. It's just very literal in your story. Yeah. Yeah. Concentrated. Well, in the first generation, you know, I think this is why the work of Toni Morrison's beloved was so important to me. Because I saw in beloved a first generation testimony in the in the character set the leaving the South and creating beloved her daughter to, you know, to save her daughter. And never before have I seen a parallel close enough to the story of my own mother who comes out of her own epicenter. And I'm being her son. Also, my own beloved to see American literature hold the testimony of first generation survival to live on both sides of death and life. In one short period of time, half of one's life felt so powerful to me, and I learned so much from that book. I want to talk about the power of words and language, which given the beginnings of your life, as you said, your family was illiterate. Your mother never spoke English, and really only, I think you said it could read him writing Vietnamese at a better fifth grade level. There's a lot of dyslexia in your family. You also struggled with that. I wonder-- and how old were you when you actually learned to read? A lot of the magazines, say 11. I mean, you don't wake up at 11. OK, let's set the sorry state. You don't wake up one morning and start reading books. It's a slow, arduous task. So I started reading-- I went to ESL. I went through the American education system for better force. And I was able to read, but my fluid chapter book reading, where I could just sit down and read a book didn't happen until I was 11. But I was able to pick out words here and there. It was much delayed, yeah. I mean, was there a moment where you can look back and where you started to feel in your body the power of words which you now work with? Right away. I mean, I was surrounded by storytellers. Right. By survivors and storytellers. And so my grandmother and my mother and my aunts would tell stories to recalibrate their past, to make sense of their past. And my root in the narrative and literary techniques and embodiment begins way before I enter the classroom. And when you think about how people tell stories, stories are carried in the body. And it's edited each time the person tells it. And so what you have by the time someone tells a story is a master class of form, technique, decision, imagery, even how to pause, which you don't really get on the page. Arguably you do in poetry with the line break. And this is what these women were giving me. I didn't know how valuable that gift was. I'm Christa Tippet, and this is on Being. Today revisiting the extraordinary, prescient conversation I had with the writer Ocean Bong at On Air Fest in Brooklyn on the Cusp of the Pandemic. It's also very moving and interesting to me the way you started talking about this. You write about how Vietnamese culture that you were immersed in how language is so embodied. I mean, someplace you said, a lot of love is communicated in Vietnamese culture through service. We cook, we massage, we scratch each other's back. There's not a lot of saying I love you, but it's communicated in those ways. Yeah, the body is the ultimate witness to love. And I learned that right away. We don't say I love you. If we do, we say it in English as a sort of goodbye. Really, that's so interesting. Yeah, yeah. It's almost like a cultural thing, just kind of-- we almost say it in lieu of goodbye. We don't know how to say goodbye either, right? It's just we say bye-bye, right? And I think because what happens is that through the body and through service, you articulate through paying attention. Nothing can say I love you more than feeling it from somebody. And I think this relationship is how I start to see words. I looked at them as if they were things I could move and care for. And the language of energy. You use a lot of energy metaphors and imagery for how you work with words and how words work in us. Yeah, I think it's as a species, as life on earth, we've been dying for millennia. But I don't think energy dies. It's transformed. And when you're using language, you can create it, use it to divide people and build walls, or you can turn it into something where we can see each other more clearly as a bridge. And that notion that you are a participant in the future of language is something, I think, our American education failed us. Say some more about that. You are a participant in the future of language. Well, we're taught, particularly elementary school, to learn a standardized language. And when you ask, why is it this way? Why is this the standard? You arrive at a very arbitrary answer. And an answer, which actually excludes, often people of color, your English is wrong. This English is right. But in fact, language is always changing. And I think it's the poets, the writers, and even the youth, they're using language to cast new meaning in the same way Chaucer just winged English spelling. There was no standardized spelling. Right. And he was like, spring, S-P-R-Y-U-G? Sure. Let's try it out. And I think the way language exists is similar to, when I was in Harvard, we were surrounded by these abandoned buildings, these old factories, the cult done factory, was in Hartford. And it sold weapons to both sides during the Civil War. And we would go into these abandoned warehouses and just to play and explore. And I would remember seeing these old warped windows. The glass just melting and looking through at my city. The city I thought I knew so well through this glass was so surreal. Everything changed. Everything was warped. And to me, that's what language is, the glass. You think it's fixed. You think it's clear pain of glass, but in fact, through years it starts to drip and melt and change. Right. Yeah, even that notion, that language is clear. Even this presumption that we walk around making, that what we mean when we use any word transmits perfectly to another. It's always imperfect, which is also-- what makes art so exciting and creative. Right. We often tell our students the futures in your hands. But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to live in first. We pride ourselves as a country that's very technologically advanced. We have strong good sciences, good schools, very advanced weaponry, for sure. But I think we're still very primitive in the way we use language and speak, particularly in how we celebrate ourselves. You're killing it. Right. You're so acute about how the violence of the American lexicon-- We have to ask. I'm not saying it's wrong, per se. I use it, too, being a product of this country. But one has to wonder, what is it about a culture that can only value itself through the lexicon of death? I grew up in New England, and I heard boys talk about pleasure as conquest. I begged her. She's in the bag. I owned it. I owned that place. I knocked it out of the park. I went in their guns blazing. Go knock 'em dead, drop dead gorgeous, slay. I slayed them. I slew them. Yeah. What happens to our imagination when we can only celebrate ourselves through our very vanishing? I mean, even you, as a poet, have said people say to you, you're killing it. Yeah, right. What does it do to the brain? We know language matters. Yeah, what are they doing to us? They did a control where they were trying to get these lab mice to move through a maze. And they labeled one mouse, the smart, intelligent mouse. And the other mouse was the control, just a normal mouse. The reality was that they were both normal mice. There was nothing special about them. But the one labeled the superior mouse always went through the maze faster. And that phenomenon is actually something that's still studied. But one theory is that it was the human beings who attended them. The ones that had the good label, the promising label, were attended to with more care. And I suppose a lot of that was subconscious. But it's in a way in which even the words we are thinking is shaping the way we're interacting. Yeah, absolutely, on the subconscious level. And so I think what happens if we alter our language? Where would our future be? Where will we grow towards it? We start to think differently about how the world is. You know, the sub-battleground state. Right. Oh, it goes on and on. I thought the civil war was over. Yeah. Yeah. But we're in battleground state. Yeah. Target audience. I started to notice after 9/11 was this language of hunting down. Hunting down terrorists. But that's language used for animals. Yeah. And that coarsens us. Yeah, I grew up right in the shadow of 9/11. It created something very interesting because we were essentially the last generation to play outside thoroughly. Yeah. Right. It was like tag and manhunt. You know, those things were gone overnight. I saw it with my own eyes. Our nation became a nation that dictated fear through colors. Today's red tomorrow's orange, yellow alert. So you mentioned the Buddhist practice that was part of your childhood that you then kind of rediscover and make your own as an adult. Feels to me like this space you inhabit what you see so clearly and insisting on holding the complexity of that. It seems to me that you do have ways. And I think also the implications of what you're saying is what you're saying is that these are. This is a rigor of how we use our words and how we understand the power we have to move through. Time and through ordinary experiences of our day that we all have it in ourselves to claim right now. But you have ways of making that more possible in yourself. I mean, I read, is it true? Do you still do you live across from a cemetery? Yes, I do. And that you perform this Zen Buddhist death meditation. Yeah. I go out and I walk along the cemetery and even without it I sit down and I do a death meditation. And it sounds very morbid but the practice is actually supposed to bring yourself into the inevitable. The conditions of our lives will be vanquished through death. And then all the pettiness, the little anger that you have with those you love or those you don't love and your neighbor, the little things falls away. It's so small when the ultimate lasting reality is death. And I think it goes back to Noah's arc too. Noah was also doing death meditation. He was a Zen Buddhist. I think so. You don't know who is Jewish. I think so. But I think all religions have this, you know, outside of all of the orthodoxy or the rigor of ceremonies. At the center of it is trying to remind us that we will die and how do we live a life worthwhile of our breath. And I think thinking about death and thinking about what we do towards it around it helps me center myself in this such a chaotic space. And I do think it's part of my own nurturing of my own mental health. [Music] After a short break, more with Ocean Vong. On Being with Christa Tippett is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation. Funding research and catalyzing conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. Learn about the latest discoveries in the science of hope and optimism, forgiveness and free will at templeton.org. [Music] I'm Christa Tippett and this is on Being. Today a conversation with the wonderful writer Ocean Vong that happened right before the world changed in 2020. But that speaks so vividly and hopefully to the realities we have since come to inhabit. There's so much I want to talk to you about it. It's beautiful actually what's emerging here and it feels like you've described how your method of creating is that you walk a lot. Again, it's embodied practice and you walk and you walk and things build up in you. And there's a way in which I feel like words and meaning kind of flow out of you, which is also an experience one has in reading your work. And as we're hearing it's consonant with the way you understand reality and help other people understand reality. I mean, it's not always that smooth. No, I'm sure. I'm sure it's not. It's kind of like, you know, a lot of things flow but not all of them are good. Sometimes I got to rain it back. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I didn't want to suggest it. I, you know, there was, I just wanted to note this. There's a, the picture on the cover of Night Sky with exit wounds. It looks like such a happy picture of a little boy and two women who love them. You imagine one of them is his mother and you. In fact, you guys were in a refugee camp in the Philippines and you had to, someone took that picture and you paid them for that picture. Yeah, three cups of rice for that photo. We were in a refugee camp and we got rations on each day, each family. Got three cups of rice and there was a photographer who went around. You know, even in a refugee camp, you know, it's a microcosm of the world. Right. Somebody's going to try to make a business. And, you know, I was thinking about the cover for my first book. That was my first book and we had several ideas. But I think part of my education with the history of Vietnam and America's involvement in it became something very different from what was given to me in the textbooks. The textbook says, well, here's, first of all, here's five chapters on George Washington. What he ate, what kind of teeth he had, what kind of tree he chopped down. Yeah. And by the way, you know, somebody chopped down a fruit tree as a red flag for me. I was going to say, nobody has a wife. Right. Chopped down a fruit tree. And, you know, so both the myth, I realized the myth of America was so strong. Yeah. And it's very interesting because when we got to the Vietnam War, it was like two pages. There's a photo of Kennedy, then there's a photo of Nixon. Something bad happened over there. Anyway, it's over. Then we went on to the Gulf War when we were heroes. So I thought, by time I was in college, I got to figure this out. So I started doing my own research and I realized right away that one's research with the Vietnam War, something I was not prepared for, to see upwards of hundreds of dead bodies, Asian bodies. Bodies that look like me. So when you are most recognizable in your research as a corpse, it does something to you. Sometimes the bodies were so mangled, you didn't know where one began and ended. And so I wanted for my first book to have Vietnamese bodies on the cover that were living. And so that photo was a moment of salvaging and preserving bodies in transit. What was it about these women, I thought, that would surrender their very sustenance in order to preserve their image? Right, and even when you came here, I mean, somewhere I think you said it in that, you know, you had to pay for that picture. You had to pay to be seen and even what you're saying about how even in that moment, and I was a child, but you know, the fact of being able to see those bodies was what became is actually what ended the war. And then after that, we never saw bodies come home from work again. They learned. Yeah, they learned. But you, even when you came here, and this is about the immigrant experience, but it's also about being Vietnamese. Your mother would say to you, "Remember child, don't get noticed. You're already Vietnamese." Yeah, it's interesting that wisdom often arrives as a warning. I think it's often something that those in the center, those in power, never know, that before you leave the house in order to achieve yourself, right? One sends one's children to school in order to fulfill their dreams. And in order to do that, you have to be warned that there is a strike against you, by the way. So sink in, fade away, right? And I think that's the great crisis of the first and second generation. The first generation made it here, and to live at all is such a privilege that they're happy and even encourage you to put your head down. Work, fade away, get your meals, and live a quiet life. And I think the second generation, the great conundrum there, the great paradox is that they want to be seen. They want to make something. And what a better way to make something and fill yourself with agency than to be an artist. So many of us immigrant children end up betraying our parents in order to subversively achieve our parents' dreams. Right, right. Your mother worked in a nail salon of her life, and you worked there, and members of your family worked there. And I love it that you were eventually able to buy her a house, and you always wanted a garden, because you are now seen. She watched you. I love the story. One of you would tell it about the experience she had when she first came to hear you read. And of course, she couldn't understand the English, but her reaction to you. You know, the first time I was reading at the Mark Twain house of all places in Hartford. And it was nearby, so I asked her to come, and she was the first time she saw me read. And of course, she doesn't understand the English, but she was so proud to just see her son up there, you know, in a spotlight, a small spotlight. And I went back to her. After I read, people clapped, and they stood, and it was lovely, and I went back to her, and she was sobbing. And being the beautiful son, I said, "Well, what did I do? What happened? Are you okay?" And she said, "No, I just never thought I'd live to see all these old white people clapping for my son." And, you know, I thought it was interesting because I said, "I'm trying to understand what that means." What it means, what kind of validation is that? You know, it's not necessarily one that I share myself, you know, so I almost had this arrogant gaze to it. And I said, "That doesn't seem like victory to me, just because of bunch of white folks, you know, clapped. Victory is something else to me, something more." And then, until the next day, I was at the salon again with her, her makeups off, and she put her nice dress away, and she wore the reading, took her earrings off, and right out the gate in the early morning, I saw her and watched her kneel at the pedicure chair before one old white woman after another. It was so humbling because I thought, "Right." Finally, she was below their eye level for so many years, and for one brief moment in Mark Twain's house, they saw her face to face as an equal. And that's what I understood, that is victory. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is on Beeing. Today with the writer Ocean Vong, recorded at On Air Fest in Brooklyn in March 2020. We also took some questions from the last live audience any of us would be in for some time. I have to say that probably I've been listening to Krista for as long as I can remember, and this has to be one of the most moving, tender, beyond words, conversations I've heard. And so I'm so glad that I got to see the embodiment of your language. So along those lines, I was interested to know about some of the body practices that you do. I completely hear what you're saying about the potential for language and the care that each word uttered. There also is some preparatory practices that come with that responsibility and I was wondering if you could share any thoughts on that. I do think it does begin and end in the body, your language is something we carry. I always bring this back to my students as well. I said, you're working on a poem or story. When you're hitting a dead end, when it's not going, take it with you. Get away from the desk. And I have to work with your body. Maybe there's questions you're not asking. Maybe you have to recite this poem and walk with it. This is what we've always been doing. We've been telling stories as we walked. We've been telling stories as we work side by side that this idea that language is a private isolated act is so new that I think we still haven't figured out if it's useful or not. And so I think it's valuable to open up that debate again and not to say that it has to be like this or like that for anybody, but to say if it's not working, we can do something different in alternative route. And in this sense, having the words in the air, I feel like the voice in the air is like a second page. You know, the way you can articulate the pauses, the cadences. I learned this mostly from Washington, Whitney Houston. If you listen to Whitney Houston's song, they start like a whisper. And then how do we get to the pinnacles, right? The bright lit room of her, you know, peaks, but the power and the mastery in her performance is the oscillation and the respect of how a word which is static on the page can be lifted and amplified through using the whole range. Of human emotion in the voice. So I'm an apprentice of them. You know, I would not have traded the experience of being with you physically, but I really love most of my interviews are remote. And I'm in a studio. Somebody is coming in through my headphones kind of basically, but I, there's often an assumption in people who don't work in this medium that that makes it less intimate. But to have the human voice to work with and to get everything, everything that the human voice carries, I mean, it is the body is really magical to really be able to completely focus on that. We have the body and walking and movement. I want to close you, you wrote this beautiful essay in the Rumpus in 2014 called the weight of our living on hope, fire escapes and visible desperation. It was part of the context of that piece was your uncle's death by suicide. He was three years older than you and you'd grown up together. And woven to you reflecting on these walks you do through New York City on fire escapes. I'm going to read a little bit of just and then I want you to say more, all that richness and drama sealed away in a fortress whose walls echoed with communication of elemental and exquisite language through looking at all the buildings and yet only the fire escape, a clinging extremity, inanimate and often rusting spoke in its hardened, exiled silence with the most visible human honesty. We are capable of disaster and we are scared. Yeah, it was such a blow, anyone who has lost anybody to suicide, I lost my uncle, I lost a few friends, you know, and it's the great mystery in the great violence of taking oneself out of the picture. I've been grappling with that for so long and I think one of the things that lead us to that is that you start to feel that you are always out of the picture, this loneliness, that language does not allow us to access. The way we say hello to each other, you know, "Hi, how are you?" "Oh, good, good, good, good, good." So how are you now default? It doesn't access, it fills, it's fluff, right? So what happens to our language is great, advanced technology that we've had when it starts to fail at its function and it starts to obscure rather than open. And I think the crisis that my uncle went through and a lot of my friends was the crisis of communication, they couldn't say, "I'm hurt." And looking at, you know, I would remember when I heard of his suicide, I was a student at Brooklyn College in New York and I went for the longest walk and I kept seeing these firescades and I said, "What happens if we had that? What is the linguistic existence of a firescade that we can allow, give ourselves permission to say, "Are you really okay?" I know we're talking, but you want to step out on the firescade and you can tell me the truth. And I think we're so, we built shame into vulnerability and we've sealed it off in our culture, not at the table, not at the dinner table, don't say this here, don't say that there, don't talk about this, right? This is not cocktail conversation, what have you? We police access to ourselves and the great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds and yet still not know who they are or how are you has failed us and we have to find something else. And I thought about that, what if literature, my participation in it, and that's my field, if you will, what if the poem, the story, the novel at its best can serve as a firescade? Because on the page, you don't have the awkward reality of a body bumping into someone in the supermarket, you don't have to say how about them patriots, right? You don't have to talk about the weather, you can go right in, deep. And I really happened, it changed the way I thought about writing in literature in that if we have the firescape as a reality in our buildings, what does it look like in the reality of our communication in our language? What does that look like? I'm still figuring that out, I'm still, every book, every poem I think is my attempt at articulating a firescape. But I think it was a great reckoning for me because here I am, supposedly a writer, you know, and then my uncle dies. And I've lost so much, we talk all the time, we say all these things and yet I never knew what was happening. And if that's the case, language just feel that I chose, this thing that I feel so much hope for, failed me. And it was a reckoning, I think, existentially with myself as an artist. I wonder if to close this incredible time together, if you would read, I'd just copy it out of paragraph from the end of this essay from 2014, The Weight of Our Living. The poem, like the firescape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance, a place where I can be and as honest as I need to, because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions, and even my loved ones. My uncle is gone, I will never know exactly why, but I still have my body and with it these words hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be, how can it not, the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm, and I want to tell you this often, that despite being so human and so terrified, here standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night, we can live and we will. Ocean Vong, thank you so much. Ocean Vong's new collection of poetry is Time is a Mother. His other celebrated books are on earth where briefly gorgeous and night sky with exit wounds. Special thanks this week to Jemma Brown, Scott Newman, Sam Bear, and all of the wonderful staff at On Air Fest, the great gathering of podcast and audio makers. The on being project is. The on being project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoe Keating, and the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn. On being is an independent nonprofit production of the on being project. It is distributed to public radio stations by WNYC Studios. I created this show at American Public Media. Our funding partners include The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world, find them at Fetzer.org, Caliopeia Foundation, dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality, supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on earth. Learn more at caliopeia.org, the George Family Foundation in support of the Civil Conversations Project. The Osprey Foundation, a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives, and the Lily Endowment, an Indianapolis-based private family foundation dedicated to its founders' interests in religion, community development, and education. On being is produced by on being studios and many ♪ Theapolis Man's Son ♪