🌀Honoring Joanna Macy – Thank you

You may have heard that earth elder Joanna Macy is in her final days. She is in hospice space surrounded by family and friends. You can find updates at CaringBridge, and leave a message.

I feel moved to honor her and name a few of the many things I have learned from Joanna and her body of work and play, from her teaching, courage, transparency, and passion. Which of course overlap with the perspectives of all true elders:

1)The Hard Stuff – the absolute necessity of acknowledging the difficult and complicated energies and feelings, the sadness and anger and hopelessness and confusion—now sometimes called eco-grief and others—as essential feedback of Earth/Gaia. Honoring our grief is honoring our love. She would say, “It is OK for our Hearts to be broken over the world. What else are hearts for? There’s great intelligence in that.”

I remember the first time seeing Joanna. She was keynote at an ecopsychology conference, and she began by simply being, in that graceful way of presence true elders embody. Then right off she named the grief and fear in the collective that everyone was feeling, but didn’t like to talk about – and suddenly that needed mirror allowed us all to be more human. I was not alone in shedding tears. She said her biggest fear was that we would turn on each other as things collapse. This was pre-covid, before the current fascist ascendency, before this current phase of Palestinian genocide, before the hottest years on record.

Still – up until this very moment she continues to lean into the fullness of our experience, not shying away from feeling what needs to be felt, naming what needs to be named (this week she was wearing a t-shirt with Smokey the Bear saying “Only you can prevent fascism”).

“Truth-telling is like oxygen: it enlivens us. Without it we grow confused and numb. It is also a homecoming, bringing us back to powerful connection.”

2)”What a gift to be alive right now” – How fortunate we are to be alive right now, to experience this disruption, this awkward Collective Initiation of humanity into the next way of being and relating rooted in limits and true belonging, and to lend our talents and broad shoulders to the wheel of the Great Turning. Just as Joanna is now in that liminal threshold moment, that betwixt-and-between space between life and death, so we are living in that liminal moment between the old ways dying and new ways being birthed.

3)Deep Time – Understanding that we are the ancestors of Future Ones and what we do now matters. Knowing that we also come with enormous gifts bequeathed to us by the ones that came before. A Deep Time perspective helps to frame our brief moment here in a larger context, beyond the attention economy and frenetic pace of the OverCulture. For me, deep time practices are absolutely essential for staying rooted and resilient in the face of what is being asked of us.

4)Active Hope – Let’s face it, there’s no shortage of darkness, no lack of things to evoke despair. We all need to feel all is not hopeless bullshit. Joanna was a model for practicing not dwelling in the realms of despair or naive hope. In rooting in deepest values and trying to live in integrity, regardless of consequences. She would say we don’t have enough information or wide enough perception to make either wishful thinking or despair our final home.

I appreciate Joanna Macy’s way of holding Hope as active, something we do, not have: “If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”

5)Gratitude – The Spiral of the Work That Reconnect begins with Gratitude. We say it is the foundation from which everything else flows. Joanna said that “Gratitude is subversive to consumer society. Late capitalism, fated to strive for growth in corporate profits, conditions us to acquire and to keep on feeling insufficient so we keep on acquiring. In such a political economy, gratitude is a revolutionary act.”

There are so many more learnings and lessons, which I’m sure will continue to unfold over time, but I think I’ll end with my own note of gratitude directly to Joanna:

Dear Joanna,

You are in my thoughts, just as you have been in my heart and dreams over the years since I first learned of you and your body of work/play. Some years ago I sent you a copy of my first poetry book. I was surprised and honored when one day I received a postcard from you thanking me and offering words of wisdom.

I once had a dream where you were visiting a class I was teaching- I introduced you, and you said it was nice to see me again and kissed me on the forehead. I put my hands on your shoulder and looked you in the eye and told you how thankful I was for you being here.

So that is what I want to say now:

Thank you for being here. Thank you for being steadfast in your vision and for offering your compassion, insight, grace, and grit to a world in need. The world is a grander and kinder place for you having been in/with/as it. May this next threshold crossing be gentle and all the needed things.

Thank you Joanna!

And thank you all who are living love over fear, who are sharing your gifts and your hearts for the healing of a world in need.

with the iridescent song-loops of thrush and thunder moon through red firs,
Ryan