Ain't discovery wonderful? Archimedes (seen above in a hand-colored 1547 woodcut) was famous for discovering things. Story goes that he was sitting in a bathtub and noticing that his body was making the level of the water go up, and -- "Eureka," he is said to have said -- meaning, "I have found it!" Surprise.
Surprise is one of the best things about doing a podcast. We're not comparing ourselves to Archimedes; we're just lowly podcasters. But once that recording button turns bright red, and Don and I start talking to our guests, we never know where we’ll go, what we’ll discover. Thanks belongs to our guests, mostly, but Don and I get a smidgeon of credit, since we’re asking the questions, following where curiosity leads, trying to anticipate what our listeners would ask were they with us in the virtual room.
Hardly a single episode has gone by without such a moment. Honestly. In the past two weeks, we’ve had a couple of great discussions that have led us, by different paths, to such moments. Those different paths were, on one hand, poetry (with poet and essayist Ross Gay), and on the other, politics (with columnist and all-around expert Dick Polman).
Ross is so great. Most guests have to warm to a topic, but Ross, as we knew he would be, was crazy warmed-up already. Ross has written best-selling essays and poetry about joy, which for him means attention, awareness, staying open. He discusses his fascinating “rules” for his short joy-essays: must be written in one setting, longhand, 30 minutes only, in gradebooks. “I don’t really know what they’re doing,” Ross says. “I don’t want to get too good at it.” What is he after? “A transformative experience of thinking.” (Don asks a terrific question at 29:29 or so, and we’re off to the races.) And when he starts talking about his gardening, and why gardening is such a rich source of the kind of attentive living he’s after, Ross nails it: “Abundance.” “There’s an ethical component to questioning,” he says. Wonder is open-ended asking, without imposing restrictions. Wow. The whole half-hour is like that. Give it a listen.
Dick Polman is always entertaining. He gets a kick out of politics, because, besides all the other stuff, the trashy stuff, the disappointing, maddening stuff, U.S. politics – face it, all politics – is dripping with irony, tragedy, and high entertainment. There’s a chuckle behind much of what Dick talks about, and his theme throughout the half-hour is that – once again – as always, it seems, especially recently – we’re in a place unlike any we’ve ever been before. Donald Trump, love him, hate him, don’t-care him, is nothing if not entertaining. Dick thinks aloud about the manifold craziness, all the lawsuits, the millions of damages, the ninety-plus charges, the quandary of Joe Biden underwater in approval polls. Dick’s message: “Things are wild, so wild that maybe it’s better to worry … “ [My paraphrase.] But the whole conversation, while it may not solve anything (how could it?), really makes you feel a little smarter, with more of a way into the jungle-tangles of our present moment. No one better to do that than Dick Polman!
We hope you’ll find your own moments of realization when you listen. So, hey, when you have a spare half-hour, choose one of our episodes and … well, er, um … listen!
