- [Judy] Generous support for the following program provided by the Bible Family Fund of the Denver Foundation and the O'Bannon Foundation, a fund of the Indianapolis Foundation.

#*upbeat music#* - [Judy] As an 88 year resident of planet Earth, I'm constantly amazed by the infinite variety of activity I see going on around me.

The complexity of it all, the way it all works together.

Every animal, every vegetable, every mineral, every solid, liquid, and gas, each its own unique contribution just like us to the bigger picture, the vast, infinite, interdependent, interconnected web of all creation.

I admit it's a lot for me to process more than I can handle on my own, which is why I reached out to these people - I exist because you exist - Some of my most thoughtful and most thought provoking fellow Hoosiers to help me sort it all out.

- I see this connectedness in my community where pieces fit together.

- You know, if we kind of allow science to inform our social understanding and whatnot, it's that we really are connected.

- If there really is a true back and forth connection between everything and everyone, what does it mean?

How does it affect, or maybe how should it affect the way we live our lives, how we think and feel and believe and behave.

Good questions in search of good answers, which I hope we can get a little closer to as we explore the connections that exist between you and me, everyone and everything, everywhere.

#*upbeat music continues#* - [Judy] We begin our conversation today with RoseAnn Yarling.

Rosie describes herself as a photographer and she's a fine one, but what really attracted me to her was her special sensitivity to all things spiritual.

Talking to Rosie teaches you a lot about the ways the spiritual world and our everyday physical world are connected and work together.

Tell me about growing up and centered on spiritual connections for you.

- [Rosie] It was very interesting for me growing up and being a Hoosier, which I love, that I would feel things and hear things on the inside that something that feels very much like a current of energy and not knowing or thinking perhaps other people felt that as well.

But when you would share that the responses were something of they're fearful, they don't understand or maybe it's just a you have issues or they, you know, they just don't look at it back then as they do now.

And so it was important for me to be quiet because I couldn't put at that point, the words to my feelings.

It's so interesting because as a creative person, I've been working on writing some stories and I don't consider myself a writer, but the things that are coming through, I have to believe are coming from the universe, not me.

They're things that, because I do feel that connectivity to spirit, that it's giving me thoughts and ideas and how trusting me with the information, how I choose to disperse it.

- Now, when you say spirit- - Yes.

- Do you envision something?

Is this an energy force?

- Yes, most definitely.

It is for me, closing my eyes when I am with spirit.

I see more because without a sense, without your sight, then you must see what the mind's eye shows you.

I was getting this inkling of when I would meditate, of just flashes of information and I didn't know how to take it at first, but as I proceeded to connect, it was a story.

It was a story that I felt that I was called, am called to speak.

I don't take credit for it other than bringing it into this existence because it's not really me that's writing it, it's being, I feel almost like a download.

So I wanted to, we all come here to make a difference in life and this light that inhabits our bodies gives us that truth that we were talking about before and listening to it.

So I said I need to listen to it.

- Describe how what you would, how you would label this your writing.

- I would view it as a spiritual science fiction, bringing angels and our better good of who watches over us.

And to me that is spirit.

I believe in spirit and I don't have a necessarily, I, you might call that person God or that entity, that energy God.

It's more the universe to me.

And I feel that it is something that watches over us in kindness and love.

- Well you went to Purdue, so how did it fit in there?

Well, it gave me a good background and I'm incredibly grateful.

So it fits in that it gave me the logic side to my spirit.

- Next, let's spend a little time with Rabbi Sandy Sasso.

Sandy's approach to spirituality centers, of course on the teachings and practices of her Jewish faith.

But Rabbi Sandy's message of love and respect, of peace and understanding, of passion and compassion really connects with everyone.

- [Sandy] I think everything is connected because anything we do impacts another person.

It actually does it in our brains because I am talking to you at this moment and you are talking to me.

Something is changing inside of us because we are learning something new and we're making an impression on each other and that changes who we are and then what we will do in the future.

- Alright, in Judaism I often think of the traditions, we think of fiddler on the roof saying #*sings Yiddish#* tell how traditions connect us.

- Well, traditions are, connect us in many different ways because when I do a ritual that generations ago my ancestors did, I am connected to them through time.

Now also, I am connected to other people in my community who are doing that same ritual in the same time.

So I am connected through space.

So the richness of tradition is that it brings us close to the past and it also brings us close spatially with others spread around the world.

We have connection to these people 'cause we are performing some of the same things they perform and saying some of the same words.

That doesn't mean we can't transform some of that tradition and maybe do it a little bit differently, but we still feel connected.

And when I travel around the world before Covid, you know, I might go to another synagogue in another country where I really don't understand the native language, but when they begin to chant the traditional prayers, I feel I am a part of this community.

- Okay, traditions can unite certain segments or groups, but they can separate from others who have different traditions.

Talk to me or give me a story about how, everything can be used for good or for bad.

How we make connections at places where there are dangers that they will be separators.

- That's a wonderful question about how tradition can unite us and also divide us.

So difference is not bad.

In fact, it's what makes the world so beautiful that everything is not the same.

Difference becomes bad or dangerous, when we think of one tradition as inferior or superior to another.

I imagine it as a puzzle.

Each piece is a different shape and has different colors on it.

By itself, it's just a piece, but we bring it together.

We bring all those differences together and we create something beautiful.

The same thing with a mosaic.

Each piece in and of itself is important, but it only makes something extraordinary when it is joined with other pieces.

Watching the news about the Ukraine, it shows how we are connected.

I mean, this is thousands of miles away, and yet we feel for the people there.

We recognize if it weren't for nations coming together, the loss would be even greater and much quicker.

What happens there with a democracy can affect all of us and other democracy.

Nothing happens without repercussions.

- [Billie] Whether it's light or water or a plant or a human interaction or a basket or a drum or a sound.

I feel like there is this exchange of energy happening amongst us all.

- Next, against the backdrop of Lake Michigan and the Indiana Dunes, we meet Billie Warren.

Billie's upbringing as a member of the Potawatomi tribe has had a profound and lasting effect on the way she sees the world connect with her and how in turn she connects with the world.

She was eager to share her thoughts with us and I'm glad she did.

She certainly opened my eyes.

- My name is Billie Warren.

It's B-I-L-L-I-E-W-A-R-R-E-N. And that is my formal birth name.

And my spirit name or Potawatomi name is Wabge Indigenicous.

And I won't attempt to spell that for you, but that means white swan.

- And tell me again your indigenous name is - Wabge.

- And how did you get that?

- I got that from a medicine man that connects through ceremony and you're named after and through your ancestors and you get four colors, which are your like energy colors if you will, or your birth colors and your spirit name.

And it's tied to your purpose and my purpose and white swan is connected to the water.

And the water and the ecosystem is my purpose.

- Now has your family, several generations back lived right in this area?

- Yes, so the Potawatomi people, I'm Pokagan Potawatomi, they have been regionally in this area since time immemorial.

- Now you are right here on water.

- Yes.

- Help us to broaden our understanding of, water really does connect everybody how that works.

- Women are connected to water in a very spiritual way and we're the caretakers of water and the chosen ones to carry sacred beans or babies through our womb.

And we have special responsibilities connected to the water to have ceremony for the water, to respect water and to really know that we are one with water.

And that water is living.

Traditionally in the anishinabe, which means original people language.

We didn't have an egocentric word like I, and so everything was, we as in we, our family, we our community, we everything living.

So a rock and water could be considered living to me and my culture and to not have this hierarchy or elevation of ego is to know that every one and everything is valued and has purpose and to hurt someone else or another energy is to hurt myself.

Because our energy is always being exchanged, whether you think of it in a western way of chemistry and molecules bumping into one another with barriers and walls like skin, that we are all sort of porous and united in one and won.

And going back to my indigenous culture, we are all connected to the plants and the healing properties in the plants even is something that can be negotiated when you pick it in a respectful way opposed to disrespecting the plant and just pulling it.

Does that make any sense?

- Yes.

- This is a hoechunk basket I'm told.

And it's a couple hundred years old.

It's an antique.

It's significant to me because my grandmother's deceased, but she used to make baskets like this.

This basket reminds me of seven generations before me and after me.

And although there were many more than seven generations, it puts me in a place where when I am, whether I'm praying or dancing or socializing, that we need to treat our past, present, and future as one.

And with value and respect.

- If you were to play a game of connect the dots with the milestones of Jim Poyser's life and career, here's some of the dots you'd be connecting.

- A television show in South Bend, Indiana.

Telecommunications in English at college, doing theater in Bloomington for years and years.

I worked in a nursing home for years in Bloomington too.

The newspaper job, right?

That was the biggest part of my career.

- And if you knock on Jim's door and accept his invitation to come on in, - Come on in!

- You'd be witness to one of the most amazing collections of what might appear to be disconnected stuff, but is in its reality also completely connected.

When I walked into your house, your house to me is warm, cozy, but it's exciting, it's exploring.

You're uniting things that people often don't connect and we're talking about everything really is interconnected.

So tell me how your house is a living example of your willingness to look for connections and sometimes connections in such unexpected places.

Tell me about that.

- If we took a walk and looked at all the stuff in this house, I'd really be connecting you to a lot of the materials from my wife's family, rich in history, dating back to the Booth Tarkenton era.

And there's so much family lore and history that she brings into it.

My life, not so much.

My life, it's more the books.

I was a book reviewer for a couple of decades, so books are everywhere and I love to read, and some of the other materials might have been found on the street as people are throwing stuff out.

'cause I'm a major scavenger.

So you take that history and that attention to aesthetics in detail that, again, would come more from my wife than me.

And then you add in the scavenger aspect and I think you have then a nice fabric of all these things being connected together.

It really is just about being curious and being interested in everything.

I mean, isn't everything interesting?

- Back to the game of connecting the dots that make up Jim's life and career, this is the most recent dot.

Director of Advancement with Earth Charter of Indiana, where he makes full use of his passion to educate about the dangers of, and the solutions to climate change.

- It's hard to remain broad-minded in the world in which we live.

- Why is it essential?

- Well, you know, I come at this from the climate crisis perspective all the time.

This challenge is so profound.

We can't do it on our own and we can't do it isolated in our tribes, our political parties.

We have to work together to solve it.

Climate change is gonna create all sorts of extreme weather events in which we're gonna be forced to help our neighbors.

So, I come this from the perspective of survival and from abundance and from thriving in a climate challenged world.

We need each other and we're gonna have to get over our differences to be able to find that connection.

- [Joseph] So whether you are Muslim or Jewish or Christian or Hindu or even an atheist, there is a desire to see and to connect with things and ideas that are bigger than you are.

- Finally today I'd like us to spend a little time in the eye-opening, mind expanding presence of this fellow Hoosier.

Author, researcher, and teacher Joseph Tucker Edmonds.

- My name is Joseph Tucker Edmonds.

I am the associate director for the Center for the Study of Research for the Study of Religion and American culture here at IUPUI.

I research religious movements and I researched the way in which people decide whether they want to leave or stay in a religious movement.

What makes them excited about a religion or what makes them concerned that the religion is no longer connected to their wellbeing and who they want to be or who they want to see their community as in the world.

- What do you say if a person were to respond: Well, I find God sitting in a mountain by myself as opposed to I lead the choir.

I go to the-, I say the Lord prayer with everybody else on Sunday morning.

- I say, wow, the variety and the diversity of religious experience is so broad.

It's so unfathomable.

It's so diverse that that is something that we need to think about.

That's why I study alternative religious movements, because I'm interested in the wide birth of religious and spiritual experience.

You know, I found God on a mountain.

I found God on the side of a road.

I found God dancing with my cousins or my, you know, fraternity.

I found God or the divine just in the middle or at the middle of night when I was by myself, right?

These are the places and the spaces that I wanted to study, right?

Because it allows for us to think about the ways in which we are connected.

That folks, in all of those moments, were looking for something else.

Were looking for something that was going to heal them and help them and connect them.

And the question is, how do we talk to one another?

The number one way that I see that happening is that we begin to invite and to go into places and institutions that we used to either devalue or not see as being as important in our everyday lives.

It means going to these new spaces, mosque and religious buildings, where we didn't usually attend.

It means maybe inviting folks and inviting ideas that we otherwise saw as negligible or unimportant in the way that we organized and constructed the world.

I think that the thing that pushes folks to integrate or to bring into conversation these opposing viewpoints is the question of how do I live a good life?

How do I serve and support the people around me?

How do I take care of this community that I've been given responsibility to?

So let me give you an example.

- Yes.

- Folks will sometimes say, well, I believe that the only way to God is through Jesus Christ.

However, I find myself located in a community that has Muslims, that has, you know, Hindu believers, that has folks that are atheists.

And so I also believe that I am called to take care of and support those folks and their wellbeing.

So how do I combine and bring those two things together at our best?

We realize and recognize that we have to do both things simultaneously.

And often when we're talking about folks who identify as religious, who identify as even sometimes what we may consider as conservative or as committed to a singular way of understanding the world, they also make a claim that love and justice and concern for the neighbor is equally as important to their everyday lives.

So I think that at the core folks understand that their religion is about a set of beliefs and then a set of practices.

And at the core of those set of practices is then how do I put those practices actually into play in a community of folks who think differently than I do, who look differently than I look and who imagine maybe different futures than I imagine.

And I think that that's where we can find some connection.

The core aspect of any religion is the relationship between the divine and the everyday person.

The divine values that everyday person.

The divine has created, that everyday person.

The divine sees that person as having worth, as having meaning, as having purpose.

And the moment we see that as at the core, we are then compelled to recognize the worth, the value, and the meaning in other people around us.

#*gentle guitar playing#* - In my quest to understand where I fit into the cosmos, I knew I needed to ask others what evidence they have found to the question, how is everything connected?

I have a lot more insights after listening to spiritual messages like those from Rosie Yarling and Sandy Sasso, and then Billie Warren, Joseph Tucker Edmonds, and Jim Poiser.

They helped me discover how seemingly spiritual matters translate into everyday behavior.

What are your wanderings and wonderings going to reveal to you about the interconnectedness of all?

I'm Judy O' Bannon.

Thanks for watching.

#*Gentle music continues#* - [Narrator] Generous support provided by the Bible Family Fund of the Denver Foundation and the O'Bannon Foundation, a fund of the Indianapolis Foundation.