Becoming Wise

The last episode of season two. Robert Thurman and Sharon Salzberg are icons of American Buddhism, and they are joyful, longtime friends. They challenge us to reframe our anger by seeing love for our enemies as an act of self-compassion. “It’s very hard to see love as a force, as a power rather than as a weakness, but that is its reality,” Salzberg says.

Sharon Salzberg is a meditation teacher and the cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She is the co-author of “Love Your Enemies.” Her other books include “Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness,” “Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation,” and “Real Happiness at Work: Meditations for Accomplishment, Achievement, and Peace.”

Robert Thurman is the president of the Tibet House U.S. and the co-author of “Love Your Enemies.” His latest book is “Man of Peace,” an illustrated biography of the Dalai Lama.

Find the transcript at onbeing.org.

Naturalist Terry Tempest Williams brings meaning and direction to the grief around ecological loss and climate change. She’s a self-described “citizen writer” rooted in the American West, and she draws connections between fierce love and hard work — both in the natural world and the human world. “It all comes down to relationships, to place, to paying attention, to staying, to listening, to learning — of a heightened curiosity with other,” Williams says.

Williams is a writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School. Her books include “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice,” “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” and most recently, “The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks.”

Find the transcript at onbeing.org.

Astronomer Natalie Batalha embodies a planetary sense of what “love” is and means. She says her experience searching the universe for exoplanets — earth-like bodies beyond our solar system that could harbor liquid water and life — fundamentally shifted how she thinks about the human experience on this planet. “You see the expanse of the cosmos, and you realize how small we are and how connected we are,” she says. “And that what’s good for you has to be good for me.”

Natalie Batalha is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She served as the project scientist for NASA’s Kepler mission from 2011 to 2017.

Find the transcript at onbeing.org.

A civil rights elder and speechwriter for Martin Luther King, Jr., the late Vincent Harding brought the wisdom of the movement to young people in hurting places. He offers the image of a “live human signpost” as a guiding light toward the kind of support and mentorship we can offer one another in our work toward a beloved community. “When it comes to creating a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, democratic society, we are still a developing nation,” he says. “But my own deep, deep conviction is that the knowledge, like all knowledge, is available to us if we seek it.”

Vincent Harding taught at Iliff School of Theology. He authored the magnificent book “Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement” and the essay “Is America Possible?”

Find the transcript at onbeing.org.

Naomi Shihab Nye says writing is “an act that helps you, preserves you, energizes you in the very doing of it.” She calls herself a “wandering poet,” and her words point to shining corners of beauty in the world we see every day.

A visiting poet all over the world, Naomi Shihab Nye is a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. Her books include 19 Varieties of Gazelle, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, and Transfer. Her most recent book is The Tiny Journalist.

Find the transcript at onbeing.org.