Renowned writer Louise Bernice Halfe, also known by the Cree name Sky Dancer, has been named Canada's new parliamentary poet laureate. Halfe, who was raised on Saddle Lake Reserve and attended Blue Quills Residential School in central Alberta, is the ninth poet to hold the position, and the first to hail from an Indigenous community.
Read MorePeace seems illusive. And yet, every Christmas season, we cling to the hope of it, search for the sight of it, hold it, if only momentarily, within our hearts, and pray for a world of it. Here is Maya Angelou’s poem for it accompanied by children’s imaginings of it from all over the world.
Read MoreNative American Poet Laureate, Joy Hardio, draws on First Nation storytelling and histories, as well as feminist and social justice poetic traditions, and frequently incorporates indigenous myths, symbols, and values into her writing. She is a writer of profound beauty, calling her readers to relocate themselves in the landscape, in their own personhood.
Read MoreBayo Akomolafe, is the chief curator of The Emergence Network, a research inquirey in the otherwise. It asks the questions: What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis. Here is his poetic offering: In the morning, you won’t find me here, A Meditation on Blackness.
Read MorePoetry, Audre Lorde tells us, names “the nameless so it can be thought.” On Being features poets across our media and public life offerings because poetry, for all its craft, is more than a craft. It is a necessary art. Poetry speaks to the way we could be. Poetry doesn’t have a single purpose, but it might help us live with purpose.
Read MoreIn Rainer Maria Rilke’s seminal collection of poetry, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, the great twentieth-century poet explores the nature of—and his relationship to—God through divinely “received” prayers.
Read MoreIn written word, and simple video, here is a poem that draws together the ecological and the spiritual, reminding us, as we seem to have forgotten, that all the universe and everything in it, is sacred. This is What was Bequeathed Us, from Gregory Orr’s How Beautiful the Beloved.
Read MorePádraig Ó Tuama is the delightful host the Poetry Unbound podcast. He asks people to stop for 12 minutes every day and simply be still and listen to a poem, and some thoughts about it. This is art and spirituality all in one. Stillness and creativity woven together.
Read MoreThe season of Eastertide is the season of resurrection, the season of new life. Arriving at the same time as the emergence of spring, we have all around us evidence that from the cold, hard, seemingly barren ground, astonishing wonders may emerge. Wendell Berry has learned from the earth and offers us his manifesto for practicing resurrection.
Read MoreDavid Whyte is an Anglo-Irish poet who writes and teaches poetry, and its powerfully transformative nature. He has said that all of his poetry and philosophy are based on "the conversational nature of reality.” His beloved poem, Everything is Waiting for You, invite us into this conversation.
Read MoreWe stretch our wings, head thrown back in the effort it takes to open ourselves to all that might be, not knowing whose fingertips we will touch in the aching desire to connect with another.
Read MoreMary Oliver saw the fingerprint of the divine in every detail of nature, marrying her love for all things alive with her search to make sense of the world. Here she reads from her own poetry.
Read MoreMary Oliver was a woman of such deep faith in the goodness of things. A Pulitzer prize winner at a young age, Mary spent her life asking the deeper questions of life, searching out the answers through her affinity with the natural world, a place she had retreated to during a difficult childhood. She saw the fingerprint of the divine in every detail of nature. .
Read MoreIn this podcast from The On Being Project with Krista Tippet, Krista speaks with one of her beloved teachers, Ellen Davis, as they ponder the world and our place in it, through sacred text, with fresh eyes. We’re accompanied by the meditative and prophetic poetry of Wendell Berry, read for us from his home in Kentucky. If you are interested in how our Biblical text connects to the environmental movement, here is a wonderful exploration of farming, scripture, and how we are bound in a sacred relationship with our earthly home.
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