SOF Observed

First Time Flying a Kite Trent Gilliss, online editor The...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 07:14:46 -0600

First Time Flying a Kite
Trent Gilliss, online editor

The footage spliced together in the video above comes directly from the home library of Adele Diamond and her husband, Don. During her interview, she told Krista the following story:

So I think mysteries are just wonderful. It’s very interesting because when I made this book for the Dalai Lama, I put a lot of love and time and effort into it. And my husband said, who came with me to Dharamsala said, ‘If you’re going to give him a present, I want to give him a present too.’ So he wanted to give him a kite because he didn’t think the Dalai Lama got to spend enough time playing. …

And so then he found online that he could get a package of 10 plain undecorated kites very inexpensively. So he asked me if I could find classes of school children to decorate them. So I contacted a colleague, Kim Schonert-Reichl, and she helped me find a class of children with developmental disorders, many of them ADHD, who were either not on medication or on reduced medication because they were doing mindfulness. So they had heard of the Dalai Lama, and they were very excited to be decorating these kites. And there were two children per kite. So on one side, they did self portraits, so it looked like a Picasso because half of the kite is one child’s face and half of the kite is the other child’s face. Anyway, so my husband brings all these to Dharamsala and we get a private audience with His Holiness and we had the wisdom not to bring all the kites with us to the audience because the Dalai Lama said thank you but it was very clear he wasn’t going to fly any kites; he’s was going to put them in a drawer.

So after that we went to visit Matthieu Ricard at Katmandu, where he has a Tibetan monastery. And he has many humanitarian projects in connection with that and one of them are schools for poor children. Any background, doesn’t matter, religious or ethnic. They call it bamboo schools because the buildings are all made out of bamboo. So we went to these bamboo schools and we brought the rest of the kites and we gave it to the children there. They had never flown kites before, and they were so happy to be flying these kites. And Matthieu was so happy to see the children so happy. And we took photos and videos and I brought them back to the class in Vancouver to the children who had been studying mindfulness and I showed them the pictures and they were so happy to see how happy they had made the other children.

And one of them said, ‘You know, we’re on the other side of the world but we’re all connected.’”

As if Diamond’s descriptions of the Dalai Lama, Nepal, bamboo schools, and children painting kites weren’t enticing enough, we wanted to visualize the scene of those children flying kites. What strikes me is an immense amount of joy — the children playing and Adele and Don watching their gift come to life. I hope you enjoy these few minutes of seeing the world through an act of simplicity — flying and entangling a kite in a tree.

"For His Holiness the Dalai Lama"

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:19:01 -0600

Colleen Scheck, Producer During Krista’s interview with this week’s guest, Adele...

Calvin and Hobbes: Math Is a Religion

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:22:00 -0600

Trent Gilliss, online editor Some good clean humor to start the day, direct from one of my favorite...

SoundSeen: Dramatic Play + the Developing Brain » view...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:19:16 -0600

SoundSeen: Dramatic Play + the Developing Brain
» view high-quality version
Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

For this week’s show “Learning, Doing, Being: A New Science of Education,” Krista interviewed neuroscientist Adele Diamond, who studies how social dramatic play can build “executive function” (EF) skills in children’s brains. As Diamond explains it, EF is a container term for capacities like inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. These are skills that are lodged in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which Diamond calls “the new kid on the block” because it’s the part of the human brain to develop most recently through evolution. As we grow from babies into young adults, the prefrontal cortex is the last brain area to mature. When we age, it is the first to falter.

While producing this show, we learned that Diamond serves as an advisor for a nearby charter school that incorporates some elements of social dramatic play into its curriculum. We visited the school a few weeks ago and one result is this narrated slideshow pairing Adele Diamond’s explanation of the nuts and bolts of EF with 5th and 6th graders demonstrating some of the principles she describes through improvisational theater games.

If you have the chance, check out Krista’s full interview with Adele Diamond or listen for more of this ambient audio in the produced show. I don’t know what brain area is responsible for creating an audio slideshow but mine certainly got a workout putting this together.

And, a special thanks to the teachers and students at Quest Academy for their participation in this project.

Title Fight: The Boxing Rabbi Trent Gilliss, online...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:02:15 -0600

Title Fight: The Boxing Rabbi
Trent Gilliss, online editor

Checking up on the results of the Manny Pacquiao fight on Sunday, my attention was diverted by another headline: “aspiring rabbi claims piece of 154-pound title.” Not exactly what one expects to see on ESPN.

“When I got the title shot, I was really focused and it’s very satisfying because I have been dreaming about this since childhood. I am very, very proud to do this for Israel and Brooklyn and to show that Jews can fight.”

Yuri Foreman, who emigrated with his parents from Belarus to Israel and now lives in Brooklyn, is in the final year of his rabbinical training. The undefeated boxer said of his multi-tasking disciplines, “It just shows that you can do many things. You can be a world champion and you can be a rabbi,” but later commented, “Boxing is something I probably would not advise yeshiva (school) students to do but this is what I do.”

I can’t imagine the discipline it takes to simultaneously study to be a rabbi and an elite athlete, but I marvel at the accomplishment and would love to be in the yeshiva when he returns to school.

Live Audio: Evolving Faith - Meaning, Ethics, and Ideas

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:22:00 -0600

Trent Gilliss, online editor Listen here, live at 7 pm Central! (caveat: you probably...

Acting on a Dream

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:45:00 -0600

Trent Gilliss, online editor There is much to cherish in the latest contribution to the The New York...

Life in Doris Taylor’s LabAndy Dayton, associate web...

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 07:31:22 -0600

Life in Doris Taylor’s Lab
Andy Dayton, associate web producer

After watching Krista’s interview with Doris Taylor, it was hard not to want to see her lab in person. Krista referenced Laurie Zoloth’s phrase “fiction science” during her conversation with Taylor and many of the the mental images that resulted — decellularized “ghost hearts,” cells beating in a dish, rows of pumping regenerated rat hearts — seemed to fit into that category.

So, I was excited to see how those images would hold up when we made a trip Taylor’s lab several months after the interview. While we didn’t didn’t see rows and rows of beating hearts, in the video above, we did see a singular regenerated rat heart beat in an apparatus Taylor called a bioreactor, and a moment later we also heard the story of the man with an incurable heart disease who told her that she was “building hope.”

And, in this video, we also saw the magnified image of beating heart cells as Taylor explained why “cells alone don’t make a heart” and Krista handling animal organs with their cells removed as she discussed the “surprising beauty” of the heart with Taylor (see video below).

And while the fiction science elements of her lab were fascinating, it was most engaging to see Taylor’s energy and passion come out while she was clearly in her element. Her perspective helped keep what might sound like a Mary Shelley-inspired experience focused on the aspect of her work she seems to be most interested in — life.

Swimming at the Top of the World Trent Gilliss, online editor A...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:01:00 -0600

Swimming at the Top of the World
Trent Gilliss, online editor

A thoroughly inspiring lecture from a man who has been called the human polar bear. Lewis Gordon Pugh has swum in unimaginable places, including long-distance swims in all five oceans, in order to call attention to climate change.

Here, he talks about his most recent feat: swimming one kilometer (nearly 20 minutes) in minus 1.8 degrees Celsius water at the North Pole in order to raise awareness of the melting polar ice cap and rising water levels. For every one hour he spent training in cold water, he spent four hours in “mind training” — visualizing himself at every phase of the swim and willing his brain to raise his core body temperature.

If you only have a few minutes and can’t watch all 19, I recommend dropping in at the 10:25 mark to watch a short film about his journey. It’s quite moving.

(via Mashable)

Krista on the Airwaves, via Online Streaming

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:39:01 -0600

Colleen Scheck, Producer Our hard-working host is traveling this week for speeches she has given in...

The Charter for Compassion

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:08:36 -0600

The Charter for Compassion: Last week I wrote about Karen Armstrong’s “Charter for...

Einstein Sleuthing Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer I...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0600

Einstein Sleuthing
Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

I stumbled upon a perplexing puzzle as we were fine-tuning our upcoming show with Buddhist teacher and author Matthieu Ricard. Krista had included a quote in the script by Albert Einstein that needed to be fact checked. This seemed pretty straightforward…at first.

Albert Einstein is one of those famous people who gets quoted a lot, sometimes inaccurately. My colleagues at SOF were already familiar with this from producing two companion programs about Einstein back in 2007.

Following is the quote from Einstein as it appears in The Quantum and the Lotus, a book Matthieu Ricard wrote together with astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Plug this quote into Google and you get hits galore, including references to this 1972 New York Times article. But if you look at the typed version at the beginning of this post, you’ll notice some differences — specifically the last two sentences. So where did the quote come from exactly, and in what context did Einstein originally write or say these words?

My search led me to Dear Professor Einstein, a collection of Einstein’s correspondence that features a version of the quote in question, which closely matches the copy we obtained from the Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Through Facebook, I contacted the book’s editor, Alice Calaprice, who explained that Einstein had penned his famous words in 1950 to Robert S. Marcus, a man who was distraught over the death of his young son from polio. Calaprice concurred that people often misquote Einstein — and that primary sources are the key to setting the record straight. “When we don’t have originals to prove otherwise,” wrote Calaprice, “falsehoods are sometimes inadvertently repeated even by scholars.”

To that end, Barbara Wolff, an archivist at the Albert Einstein Archives, sent us the actual image of the handwritten versions of Einstein’s letter in German and English below. I wonder about who translated Einstein’s words and whether some meaning may have gotten lost.

As I’ve resurfaced from all this Einstein sleuthing, I’ve been pondering my responsibility as producer to verify the quote’s accuracy. But, as I look at Einstein’s handwritten letter with its scrawls and cross outs, I’m reminded that language and ideas are not fixed like cement. Still, it’s my job to get it right.

What’s funny is that after all this effort, we debated ditching the quote altogether. Matthieu Ricard is such a rich voice, did we really need to bring Einstein into the conversation? In the end though, we corrected the quote, and kept Einstein, “sounding more than a little bit Buddhist,” as Krista put it, in the final script read.

Special thanks to Barbara Wolff and the Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, which holds copyright for these archival materials.

The Impressionable Faces of Buddhist Silence Trent Gilliss,...

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:30:07 -0600

The Impressionable Faces of Buddhist Silence
Trent Gilliss, online editor

Tomorrow, our latest production with Matthieu Ricard will be released via our podcast. His journey to the Himalayas and studying under some of the great Tibetan Buddhist monks and the current Dalai Lama was inspired by the films of Arnaud Desjardins.

What struck him and became the catalyst for his lifelong journey, as he told Krista in a hotel room in Vancouver, was a particular point in one of these documentaries when he saw “a series of faces, of contemplatives … in silence” — of all shapes and sizes.

I wanted to see those faces. The video above is excerpted from the 1966 film, Le Message des Tibétains: Le Tantrisme (deuxième partie). For the quick skinny on the portrait sequence Ricard mentions, skip to 5:45 in the clip.

Ricard describes the influence of Desjardins’s films in greater depth in The Monk and the Philosopher, a dialogue between him and his father, Jean-François Revel, a French intellectual who is well-known for his challenging critiques of Communism and Christianity:

Matthieu Ricard: …what triggered my interest in Buddhism was in 1966…

Jean-François Revel: You would have been twenty then.

M.R.: I was still at university, and just about to go to the Institut Pasteur, when I saw some films made by a friend, Arnaud Desjardins, as they were being edited. They were about the great Tibetan lamas who had fled the Chinese invasion and taken refuge on the souther side of the Himalayas, from Kashmir to Bhutan. Arnaud had spent several months on two trips with an excellent guide and interpreter, filming these masters at close quarters. The films were very striking. Around the same time, another friend, Dr. Leboyer, came back from Darjeeling where he’d met some of the same lamas. I’d just finished a course and had the chance of taking a six-month break before starting my research work. It was the time of the hippies, who’d set out to India overland hitchhiking or in a Citroen deux-chevaux, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. I was also drawn to the martial arts and had thought of going to Japan. But the sight of the pictures brought back by Arnaud and Frederick Leboyer, what they told me and their descriptions of their encounters there, all helped me make up my mind to head for the Himalayas rather than anywhere else.

J.F.R: So it was Arnaud Desjardins’s film that started it all off.

M.R.: There were several films, The Message of the Tibetans and Himalaya, Land of Serenity (which included The Children of Wisdom and The Lake of the Yogis), four hours in all. They include long sequences of the great Buddhist teachers who’d just arrived from Tibet — what they looked like, how they spoke, what they taught. The films gave a very alive and inspiring account of what it was like.

…

J.F.R.: You said they left a strong impression on you, personally. Why?

M.R.: I had the impression of seeing living beings who were the very image of what they taught. They had such a striking and remarkable feeling about them. I couldn’t quite hit on the explicit reasons why, but what struck me most was that they matched the ideal of sainthood, the perfect being, the sage — a kind of person hardly to be found nowadays in the West. It was the image I had of St. Francis of Assisi, or the great wise men of ancient times, but which for me had become figures of the distant past. You can’t go meet Socrates, listen to Plato debating, or sit at St. Francis’ feet. Yet suddenly, here were beings who seemed to be living examples of wisdom. I said to myself, ‘If it’s possible to reach perfection as a human being, that must be it.’

"Life On Gold Plates: Krista Tippett on Religious Dialogue and Curiosity"

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:02:31 -0600

"Life On Gold Plates: Krista Tippett on Religious Dialogue and Curiosity": Trent Gilliss, online...

Determining "Jewishness" in the UK

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:49:33 -0600

Andy Dayton, associate web producer Here’s a fascinating case of modern law meets...

The Fall of the Wall, JFK’s Assassination, and Two...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:46:46 -0600

The Fall of the Wall, JFK’s Assassination, and Two Birthdays
Krista Tippett, host

I was born on the night John F. Kennedy was elected president: November 9, 1960. To be more precise, the election itself was on November 8, but I was born in the wee hours of the night, in a long ago age before computerized returns, as his slim victory became apparent. My father paced the halls of the hospital with a transistor radio at his ear. He was a member of our local Oklahoma chapter of Young Democrats. He told me that I was the handsome president’s personal good luck charm. And so the Camelot president’s assassination is the earliest memory I recall — too early, some say, for me to really remember it, but I know I do. I can still feel the panic of the adults around me and the terrible sense that somehow I had failed.

Two decades later, I ended up spending most of the 1980s, most of my 20s, in a city that kept Kennedy’s memory alive like no other. He remained the unparalleled icon of the charismatic America that had rushed to Berlin’s side as the barbed wire beginnings of the Wall closed around it on August 13, 1961. I wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times when the Berlin Wall hit the quarter-century mark in 1986. By that time, it was 12-feet high — and two walls actually, with a no man’s land in between, scattered with tank traps, its every inch monitored by men with binoculars and guns. It wouldn’t be right to say that the Wall had gained acceptance in either of the German worlds it sliced apart. But it had become part of the fabric of reality, of life and imagination. And what really kept it standing was a rock-solid, ingrown fear — a faith, if you will — that the mighty Soviet Union would send in its tanks if those men with guns ever fell down on the job.

Gorbachev inspired a completely different kind of faith, one which evaporated that fear and revealed the Wall for what it was — slabs of concrete and asbestos manned by border guards, who were human beings, after all, and could not possibly resist the peaceful crush of the entire city of East Berlin moving towards them, unafraid, on the night of November 9, 1989. And so it was on my 29^th birthday that I learned, stepping off an airplane in Oklahoma, that the wall had opened up.

The suddenness of the Wall’s fall utterly defied the imagination of everyone living closest to it. Even with Gorbachev, and the political changes that rolled across Eastern Europe in the mid-80s, no one really believed it could open up from one day to the next. I recently learned that one of my great friends and colleagues from those years, John Tagliabue of The New York Times, spent the evening of November 9 watching television in a hotel room in Warsaw with the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was as stupefied by the turn of events as anyone else. I could never have imagined that I would one day walk across a bridge that had separated me by less than a mile from an East German family I loved, but had been an impassable border zone throughout our friendship.

Or that I would stroll through the inner wall and the outer wall minus the tank traps, as people chiseled and hammered out pieces to sell or to save for posterity. Nor could I have anticipated the magical reunion I would have with some East German artist friends in Austria for the Christmas of 1989. I would be there as they and their children saw mountains for the first time.

I hold these memories as a reminder that there is at any given moment much we don’t see, and more change possible than we can begin to imagine. I recently had a lovely conversation, that will air on our show in early December, with Bill McKibben. He and I are exact contemporaries; we were both born in 1960 and in college for the same four years. In 1989, he was publishing The End of Nature — the first book about the then-obscure subject of climate change. As I learned from him, though, the science of climate change had begun to emerge at the height of the Cold War. Already in 1957, two scientists at the Scripps Institution described their findings that humanity had initiated an unprecedented “geophysical experiment” that it might not survive. And if humanity is around to write history in a century or two, what was happening with the climate in 1960 and 1989 may dwarf what we perceived as the great dramas we were living through.

I draw caution as well as hope from the fact that history tends to surprise us. And I think I’ve had enough historically momentous birthdays for one lifetime.

The Daily Show, Heckling, and HopeAndy Dayton, associate web...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:32:12 -0600

The Daily Show, Heckling, and Hope
Andy Dayton, associate web producer

There was a bit of stir a few weeks ago when Jon Stewart welcomed Ann Baltzar and Dr. Mustafa Barghouti onto The Daily Show. Baltzar is author of Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories, and Barghouti is “a leading figure in the Palestinian democratic and nonviolent movement for peace.” The stir resulted from having two guests that approach the issue from a “Palestinian point of view.”

At one point in the interview a member of the audience yells “liar” to Barghouti (apparently the first heckler in the show’s 11 years), and Stewart quickly turns it into fodder for discussion asking Barghouti how he maintains hope when people “can’t even agree to begin the conversation.”

Trent had a look at the video of this exchange last Friday, and clued me in on something I completely missed — a close connection to a story Karen Armstrong tells in this week’s program. Both of these situations involve someone in the audience disrupting the discussion, and a consideration of how best to handle it. From the transcript, a story that took place at the “God 2000” conference at Oregon State University:

And then when we were on the final panel, suddenly erupted in the hall a fundamentalist who started to shriek at us incoherently. What I could make out was that he was saying that Jews and Muslims denied Jesus and therefore they were going to hell, and all of those of us who sided with Jews and Muslims were also going to hell, and this was evil. And you couldn’t hear much, because he was so incoherent with rage and despair. What I could hear, however, was the note of pain in his voice. This was not just some loony. This was somebody who was suffering and in pain, and felt profoundly threatened by what we were saying.
And the point is that we, seven of us on this panel — we’re all articulate people, we’d all been talking nonstop to each other and to the audience for the last two days. We were utterly struck dumb. None of us could say a word. We felt utterly winded by this assault. Even me, and I should have known better, because I’d just finished my book on fundamentalism. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Eventually this man was hustled out, and the moderator said, ‘Well, I wish we could have talked to him, because he is part of the conference of God, “Where Is God at 2000?” He’s part of this conversation.’ But somehow we couldn’t talk with one another. He was incoherent, we were struck dumb and useless, and this is the problem that we’re facing.

With that in mind, there’s something in Barghouti’s response that he would “very much like to meet” the man who raised his voice and heckled. Perhaps simply a willingness to start the conversation is hopeful enough.

The Tao of Cow Trent Gilliss, online editor Sometimes the most...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:33:00 -0600

The Tao of Cow
Trent Gilliss, online editor

Sometimes the most delightful surprises and promises of insight come in the form of a Facebook status update:

“So, Mom called. The cows broke out again. Two separate locations, and Dad had just repaired the fences. Hunters everywhere (makes them stampede). Hopefully they can get all the repairs done in time to make our family concert in Fergus Falls tomorrow… I know Hindus revere the cow, but Buddhists should as well, because they are really good at teaching impermanence and letting go.”

The author? Andra Suchy-Pierzina, a friend and regular performer on A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor, who grew up on a farm outside of Mandan, North Dakota.

As I read this, I couldn’t help but feel lighter and be reminded of Matthieu Ricard’s story (next week’s program, “The Happiest Man in the World”) about two women navigating muddy Himalayan roads. One kvetched; the other smiled and embraced. Andra reminds me to be the latter.

(Photos: cows on the Suchy farm before jailbreak, courtesy of Andra Suchy-Pierzina)

“Looking Out for Hope” Trent Gilliss, online...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0600

“Looking Out for Hope”
Trent Gilliss, online editor

It’s been some time since I’ve posted a Friday video snack. I don’t know about you, but these last few months have been a blur — hectic and almost harrowing at times. And there is good, a lot of good, that’s come of meeting new people and sharing our work and talking to long-lost friends back home.

Looking for a contemplative moment, an adult time-out, a centering event, I was lucky enough to happen upon this short film that puts into play Bryan Mallessa’s fictional letter to Raymond Carver with music by the band Low. The film’s remarkably meditative in its quietude for the medium. It allows one ten minutes to reflect, to peer into blizzard and cold, to think about hard times, and the joy of the road ahead.

(h/t things are happening*)

"Fort Hood Has Enough Victims Already"

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:23:00 -0600

"Fort Hood Has Enough Victims Already": Trent Gilliss, online editor Wajahat Ali, one of the voices...