Krista Tippett
Krista is an author and host of the On Being podcast
Krista and I spoke for the podcast in 2020. Below is an edited version of our conversation. You can listen to the full episode here.
Can you describe who you are beyond what you do; how you move through the world?
Well, I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. I think there is always some part of me that is a little girl from Oklahoma that ended up in the big world out there. There’s a part of me who is always discovering things, and always surprised that I’m here. And I’m a mother, and I’m a person in evolution.
You had this conversation with late John O’Donohue who gave you a description of beauty that brings me to tears. I would love to hear what the word “beauty” means to you and what is a beautiful mind to you?
I love that question. One thing I've thought a lot about is how some of the words we need the most, or that are most important to us, the words themselves get ruined and water downed and overused, and I think beauty can be one of those. So when I had that conversation with John O’Donohue, I told him “if you use the word beauty casually in a conversation, where someone’s mind might go when you use that word, where my mind might go, is to a flawless face on a cover of a magazine. But that’s not what you’re talking about.” He said “no, that’s glamour. Beauty is that in the presence of which we feel more alive ” And that’s that definition that I also have taken as my own. It’s such a wonderful definition to walk around with. Another way of characterizing beauty that comes together with that for me came a long time ago from my Islamic conversation partners. There is this notion in Islam that beauty is a core moral value…
What has come clear to me through all these conversations is that beauty is not optional, it is not soft, that it’s really something that in leading a good life, a worthy life, a wise life, even a moral life, that it is something to insist on, to seek out, to weave in, to tend to.
I’d love to talk about cultivating qualities of character. At the On Being project you have these amazing “grounding virtues”, the tag line being “what we practice, we become.” Has there been a quality of character that you maybe didn’t feel like you had that you practiced and now you feel you inhabit?
Yea, and that is the way I work with the notion of virtues and with the practicality of virtues. My thinking moved forward with that years ago when I started interviewing neuroscientists. What we’re learning about the brain and this fascinating information that our brains keep changing in the course of our lives. That we can change our biology through our behavior. Just as if you want to be better at playing piano, you practice, practice practice, that you can create muscle memory of character…
Humility is one that I’ve had to work with and I really now think of it as a quality of honoring others as opposed to not honoring yourself…
Tell me a favorite or meaningful…
Book: Probably Rilke’s The Book of Hours. There is a translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows that I come back to again and again.
Album and/or Song: I loved an album Joe Henry did that is called The Gospel According to Water.
Bookstore: There’s one here in Saint Paul called The Next Chapter. It’s where I go to dig around.
Place: Scotland is an important place to me. Scotland (and Ireland) I go and I feel like I recognize myself. It just stilled me. I got rested there and felt like it had a very healing effect on me.