Biomimicry takes the natural world as mentor and teacher - for, as Janine Benyus puts it, “we are surrounded by geniuses.” Nature solves problems and performs what appear to us as miracles in every second, all around: running on sunlight, fitting form to function, recycling everything, relentlessly “creating conditions conducive to life.” Janine launched this way of seeing and imagining as a field with her 1997 book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. There is a quiet, redemptive story of our time in this conversation - a radical way of approaching the gravest of our problems by attending to how original vitality functions.
Meeting Ruth Wilson Gilmore and drawing her out in this way is an exercise in muscular hope - and in understanding the passion of a new generation that is shaping what we will collectively become. In this sense, abolition is not primarily a matter of what to get rid of, but what to build and to orient around - being present, for example, to human vulnerability and to the ingredients that make for deep human flourishing. But when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of “abolition,” she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world, starting now, in which prisons and policing as we do them now become unnecessary, unthinkable. She’s a visionary of “abolition,” and that has become a fraught and polarizing word in our fraught and polarized public discourse. She’s a mentor and teacher to a new generation of social activism and creativity. To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time - even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara’s Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined. I might even use a religious word - it feels like a “blessing.” And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being “spiritual but not religious.” We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. She’s written other books since, with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church - about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she’s written, “alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.” And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. It’s fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. “I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ - to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real. If you’re in the U.S., find some of them here. There are many resources for mental health support.
Podcaster meaning full#
This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity - and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. And for years, he’s been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition. He’s a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions.
Podcaster meaning how to#
How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we’ve been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time.
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