The PAUSE with Ari Clibe

Can we listen deeply without compassion? And what happens when the lives we've composed leave us with regret?

In the second of two conversations, composer David Shea and Ari move beyond music into the complicated terrain of relationships, responsibility, and recovery.

David proposes that listening is not merely an expression of compassion — it is compassion in action. Together, they explore spiritual practice, the mythology of artistic genius, the wisdom of silence, and the conditions that allow creativity and human connection to flourish.

As the conversation grows more personal, David reflects on the costs of independence, the communities he kept at a distance, and choices he might have made differently. Ari considers the difference between intending no harm and recognizing the harm our actions can cause.

What does it mean to recover from our mistakes? Can relationships be repaired without returning to what they once were? And might belonging begin with a willingness to listen, take responsibility, and remain open to change?

What if listening isn't something we do with our ears, but something we experience with our entire bodies?

Composer, improviser, and educator David Shea joins Ari again this season for the first of two conversations exploring the relationships between sound, chaos, creativity, and human connection.

Drawing on more than forty years of friendship, they consider what it means to pursue artistic excellence without demanding perfection. David challenges familiar ideas about mastery, failure, and authorship, suggesting that composition itself is an act of listening — and listening an act of co-creation.

From Buddhist practice and experimental music to cultural appropriation and the vulnerability of performance, their conversation opens into a larger inquiry: Can we make room for one another without needing to control what happens between us?

What happens when being useful becomes the price of belonging?

In Fried Grief, Ari performs a two-voice dialogue between his former identity Andy and current identity Ari—two sides of a conversation about work, worth, childhood wounds, friendship, and the longing to be loved without having to prove anything.

A memory of a work ticket dropped onto a desk becomes an unexpected exploration of power, vulnerability, and trust. Through anger, silence, play, and the simple act of holding a folded piece of paper, the conversation asks what it means to stay with another person without needing to fix them—or open them up.

An intimate experiment in grief, listening, and the possibility of belonging.

The PAUSE: A sanctuary for the wild ones.

Choreographer, author, and movement analyst Alexandra Beller joins The PAUSE for a conversation about intuition, surrender, and the body’s memory. She recounts learning the dances of her young children, and how that process opened a path to younger parts of herself. Together, we explore the meaning we make from uncertainty, the grief of losing faith in humanity, and the hope that keeps us creating. At the heart of it is a question of belonging: what might become possible when we let ourselves be fully seen?

What kinds of intelligence become more valuable as artificial intelligence gets faster?

Technology futurist and self-described “free-range chicken” Asher Crispe joins Ari from Vermont for a conversation about AI, education, failure, embodiment, curiosity and the limits of efficiency. Asher works near the accelerating edge of artificial intelligence, but the conversation keeps returning to what cannot be reduced to speed or computation: deep listening, signaling intent, getting lost, nonlinear thought, the body, the forest, and the difference between the map and the territory.

Along the way: teenage zombies, a year of work compressed into a week, brakes for AI, becoming rejection-proof, “world-poor” digital life, and why walking in the woods may be a necessary counterweight to technological acceleration.

An episode about preserving something unruly in the way we think.

The premiere episode of Season Four begins in Denver with ten-year-old returning guest Virginia “Ginny” Sexton. Before heading to Red Rocks, Ginny sings, talks about growing up, and pulls Ari into a series of unexpected listening and acting experiments. What begins as a conversation about music gradually becomes something less controlled: an inquiry into attention, play, change, and what happens when a host stops steering long enough to follow where a guest is actually going.